“... 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 ...”

“... two signature touches. The other is Reacher’s habit of solving seemingly impossible problems by means of astonishing feats of ratiocination. These tend to lean more heavily on narrative logic than on swallowable deduction: in Killing Floor he tracks down a man on the run by looking at a road map and applying the ‘universal truth’ that, given a free ...”

“... historian’ that he is conveying to the open-minded reader, often burying where he means to praise. This is his first book and it has the concomitant strengths and weaknesses. It conveys boundless enthusiasm and great industry in research, but having left no stone unturned Dinshaw is at something of a loss to know what to do with the ...”

“... wonderfully creased flannels’ (alas! he is fatally ‘weak-chinned’). Becoming Jean means learning a finely tuned language of discrimination. What matters are the differences between the middle classes. The lower orders (‘the plodding workers’), like the upper classes, are a race apart. Throughout the decades Pratt nervously patrols her ...”

“... 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 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 ...”

“... concerns about the work’s carbon footprint – the extraordinary scale of computation involved means that the carbon dioxide emitted in training Transformer is equivalent to 288 transatlantic flights – and about the way it looks at language. Because it is trained on text that Google harvests from the internet, its calculations reflect the way language ...”

“... figure’, which Hunter finds implausible. Like Amiel, Swire wants it both ways, which in her case means being in on the political action and having her opinions heard, but without the responsibility of an actual job.A private diary is a self-portrait, the speech delivered to the bathroom mirror, which does not always play so well outside. Swire has a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... The connoisseur of deathbeds, of the fortitude of their occupants, of the composure of the atheist David Hume, the prison visitor who liked to watch executions, and appears to have lacked Johnson’s terror of futurity, was off somewhere on business when his wife stopped living. The journal deals with his five years as the widower formed by that crisis. His ...”

“... free economy-strong state dialectic, it was Labour that began to use unemployment as a deliberate means of deflation, and it was Labour ministers who brought the most clumsy and brutal prosecutions of journalists under the Official Secrets Act. I feel almost like apologising for mentioning anything so obvious, but neither Lloyd nor Brown give the matter any ...”

“... to that threat. As soon as the Security Council authorised its members to use ‘all necessary means’ to achieve the enforcement of its resolutions, he ordered a doubling of America’s already huge deployment. This immediately complicated the issue. In the view of military leaders, a deployment of roughly half a million men and women rendered the system ...”

“... Israeli officials, for a man detained as a suspect in the killings of two Palestinians. The man, David Axelrod, is not related to Leon Trotsky. A man with the same name, who is a descendant of Trotsky, was questioned briefly by the police in a case of mistaken identity. The arcane character of this item, which was at the top of that day’s menu, might make ...”