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“... Nora Nicholson. Nora had had a happy life and was 81 when she died, so the service was by no means a gloomy one. Sybil Thorndyke, herself 92 and crippled by arthritis, sat enthroned in the front pew surrounded by a posse of ladies who were scarcely younger. At a given moment, these attendants slid along the pew, got their frail shoulders under Dame Sybil ...”

“... and won from a sceptical Cabinet. Routledge calls MacGregor a ‘political rhinoceros’. If he means MacGregor was an antediluvian creature who charged brainlessly at his opponents, he is wrong. In Britain, as in most of Western Europe, coal mining was under threat from cheaper sources in the US, India, China and Eastern Europe. Sooner or later, the choice ...”

“... New Nations, organised by the Parsons-derived sociologist Edward Shils and the political scientist David Apter. Geertz quotes from Shils’s amusingly unself-conscious, Cold War-imperial foundational essay: The categories we employ are the same as the ones we employ in our studies of our own societies, and they postulate the fundamental affinities of all ...”

“... the resurrection of what we think – even wish – safely consigned to the past, becomes the main means by which the novella conducts its ambiguous meditations on how modern Scotland should regard its violent history. The novella has been read by some of Hogg’s critics as a deliberate attempt to undo the decencies of Waverley, as a story intended to restore ...”

“... of the correlation of forces: while Khrushchev could have chosen global war, he did not have the means to protect his ships at sea or his military forces in Cuba. Once it was absolutely clear that Kennedy meant to do what he said – remove the missiles one way or another – Khrushchev was quick to see he had to give in. The big secrets of the American half ...”

“... structure founded by Great Britain’s defeat of the French Revolution. The scholarship of David Cannadine and Linda Colley has shown how this was done and how vital the monarchy was to the process. The rejigged royal institution was the mechanism for weening an unruly, half-revolutionary people away from its own past. The defeat of France shored up a ...”

“... January, they have been managed by a new Task Force Europe, led by Johnson’s chief negotiator, David Frost, a burly, acerbic diplomat, one of the few in the Foreign Office who has always loathed the EU. Frost’s conversations with Michel Barnier have become openly bitter and recriminatory, in a way not seen before. Frost is backed up by contemptuous ...”

“... and airstrikes, American military planners felt that its imperial tasks could now be managed by means of an air war and a modest number of specialist shock troops. Throughout 2002, plans for the invasion of Iraq were reformulated to put a greater emphasis on special forces operations. Iraq would require a larger ground force than Afghanistan but would be ...”

“... between drawing and writing that he found the way out of his inability to write a novel and a means of putting his mental bric-à-brac in order. Like Alice, who can only reach the house in Through the Looking-Glass by turning her back to it, Gorey reversed the usual advice to ‘write what you know’ and wrote the apparent opposite of his own ...”

“... the crisis in Ukraine would provide an opportunity ‘to demonstrate exactly what Global Britain means’. At RUSI’s annual land warfare conference in June, the current chief of the general staff, Patrick Sanders, praised the British army’s response to the crisis and said he would now have an answer for his grandchildren if they asked what he did in ...”

“... where he taught for thirty years and lived for the rest of his life. Part of what ‘non-art’ means for Ammons is described in an early poem as ‘the non-song/in my singing’. Singing is usually ghosted by saying (the opening line of his first book – ‘So I said I am Ezra’ – can be heard as either grand or casual). In fact, I can’t think of ...”

“... and circumstances as you might see them if you were writing a novel, then access becomes a daily means of literary supply, and the task is then to make peace, if you can, between the warring truths that come at you from reality. Lillian invented new and bold ways of doing this by dramatising people’s motives, rather than merely describing them, or by ...”

“... in which the imagination is a new saviour at the heart of an aesthetic theology: ‘Poetry is a means of redemption’ or ‘Poetry is a renovation of experience’ or ‘The mind is the most powerful thing in the world.’ The Romantics may have invented this all-powerful sense of the aesthetic, but they invented the distrust of it as well. Keats could ...”

“... middle-aged people, and even some people holding blue and white flags with the star of David on them, representing the Jewish community, or so they said. Here I met my friend Vadim, a former employee of the Black Sea Shipping Company. These days he works for whatever foreign shipping agent needs a chief mate; he’s away at sea for months at a ...”

“... were getting more serious. In 1974 another Clermont habitué and founder of the SAS, Colonel David Stirling, formed GB75, a vigilante group to be mobilised in the event of civil unrest.Veronica Lucan was not only unhappy, she was mentally fragile and her relationship with her sister and brother-in-law volatile. After a spectacularly unhappy Christmas in ...”