“... soldiers tend a pair of perfectly rectangular beds of daffodils. A photograph taken the previous winter, in the Ypres salient, shows a soldier of the London Rifle Brigade posing in what is clearly intended, despite the sandbagged breastwork behind him, to be an approximation of a traditional English cottage garden. The idealised gardens, in other ...”

“... Russians; the death rate of 10-15 per cent Snyder cites for the inmates of the Gulag is given by Robert Conquest in his classic The Great Terror as a minimum, exceeded many times over in some years; citing official Soviet documents, Anne Appelbaum records that a total of 2,750,000 people died in the camps and exile settlements under Stalin, again most likely ...”

“... on the Lower East Side. They lived in cheap apartments infested with roaches and freezing in winter. They sat on benches stolen from construction sites until the firewood ran out – then they burned the benches. ‘I wasn’t going to be able to snuggle into regular human life,’ she told an interviewer in 1999.Di Prima’s homes formed the centre of a ...”

“... the circulation had fallen from 1.5m to 650,000 copies. After the print unions refused to discuss Robert Maxwell’s offer for the paper, Murdoch stepped in. ‘I am constantly amazed at the ease with which I entered British newspapers,’ he later said. Stick it up your punter! tells that story, and the story of what happened afterwards: a story which social ...”

“... high tragic conflagration Yeats made of it when he put it to the torch of ‘In Memory of Major Robert Gregory’. Paulin has learnt, probably from Seamus Heaney, how to put his sense of immediate provocation under the protection of natural and epic grandeurs. I’m surprised that the rhetorical procedure – which is just as questionable as Yeats’s ...”

“... The year Strauss was born, 1864, saw the publication of Robert Browning’s Dramatis Personae. The author of Andrea del Sarto would have found in Richard Strauss a subject ideally suited to his imaginative powers. He would have cast the composer, not, I think, in his early years, but towards the end of his life: in 1940, perhaps, in late summer ...”

“... When the King’s printer Robert Barker produced a new edition of the King James Bible in 1631, he overlooked three letters from the seventh commandment, producing the startling injunction: ‘Thou shalt commit adultery.’ Barker was fined £300, and spent the rest of his life in debtors’ prison, even while his name remained on imprints ...”

“... recapture some of their former splendour? Such thoughts were very much in my mind while reading Robert Garland’s retelling of Athens’s tribulations during those two fraught years of Persian invasion. It is a story that has been told countless times, but never before has the narrative concentrated primarily on the Athenians’ wholesale evacuation of ...”

“... not an easy thing to have on your conscience that you were personally responsible for putting Robert Mugabe in power but Wilfred Mhanda has had to live with that knowledge for the last 24 years. You might think the last year, which has seen 32 murders, countless cases of rape, torture, arson and beating, all to help Mugabe steal an election, would have ...”

“... parole e dovette ascoltarne, aspettando la fine. Se li fece i compagni. He arrived in Turin in winter, in the glare of factories, the filth of smoke. And he discovered what work was. He accepted work as the hard destiny of man – but only if all men accepted it would there be justice in the world. But he made comrades. He put up with endless talk and had ...”

“... two years ago, and protested in vain when he kindly showed me his Desert Campaign proofs last winter. I beg him, if he insists on trying to calculate the influence of Intelligence on operations, to start interviewing the surviving officers responsible for Ultra in the field; to drop his attack on Montgomery and develop an interest in the true relationship ...”

“... obvious solution to anyone struggling to make a living out of writing. Scott Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker, Nathanael West, all did their time on studio payrolls, and West and Fitzgerald in their respective last works, The Day of the Locust and The Last Tycoon, somehow succeeded in putting its ridiculous myths to serious ...”

“... trying to steal apples; standing rapt before a fruit stall, gazing at ripe pears. Today it’s Robert and Jon who are on a spree: they steal a yoghurt, a milkshake, two cartons of Ambrosia rice. Finally they steal a child, blond-haired, not quite three. One of them takes him by the hand. They lead him into the city. They walk some busy roads, they are seen ...”

“... The summer of 1970 was the winter of America’s discontent. Most of the nation’s colleges had been forced to shut down early in the wake of the Kent State massacre; anti-war protesters battled construction workers in the streets of New York; self-proclaimed political prisoners attempted bloody escapes; middle-class students planted bombs and robbed banks ...”

“... dragoons had dismounted when the Appin Stewarts and MacPhersons charged downhill out of the winter dusk. A MacPherson remembered ‘the great hurry with which we went down towards the hollow upon them, by which means they were so suddenly mistaken of us that … [we] were at their muzzles with our swords before they got all their fire ...”