“... of the Washington Post, but it never occurred to him that he could actually close the paper. John F. Kennedy took a different tack, mugging up on things that individual journalists might like to be praised about. He understood writers’ egos, and major hacks visiting the White House would be greeted by JFK as if they ...”

“... as they are, can’t help not coming up to. The second or critical section is extremely strong: John Gross on the Oxford Book, George Hartley on the early publishing, Clive James on the jazz criticism as well as the poems, Alan Brownjohn on the novels, Christopher Ricks on Larkin’s poetic style and structure, Seamus Heaney on his idealism, and others. But ...”

“... building, a 16th-century revision of the 13th-century church founded by the Knights of St John. The Hole is a statement and it is properly capitalised. The labourers, a self-confessed art collective, work the Hole by hand, with pick and shovel, turn and turn about: four days to complete a grave shaft, without any of the tortured grinding and ...”

“... collars noticeably cleaner, but – combined with the decline of heavy industry in the other major polluter, the former USSR – the telltale deposits of sulphate aerosols in Greenland ice cores fell in the 1990s. A British scientist, Professor Michael Grubb of Imperial College, London, first suggested that these two unlikely successes might become the ...”

“... articles that put the hysteria of much of the British press to shame. Not surprisingly, a major concern was with the implications of the referendum result for Denmark, which, having joined the EU at the same time as Britain (and negotiated similar opt-outs), was often billed as that strange animal, a ‘natural ally’. Following the announcement of ...”

“... much to criticise in the way the Government is treating the universities. It must bear a major share of the blame for the recent impasse. But the exam boycott was wrong in principle and wrong in practice, and wrong in practice because wrong in principle. The Vice-Chancellors, whatever tactical errors they may have committed, are not 19th-century ...”

“... about their popularity with paedophiles, and their central role in paedophile activity, this is a major distortion, especially in Dr Li’s explorations of the subjective worlds of his 20 abusers. The clear implication of Tim Tate’s book would be, indeed, either that some of Dr Li’s subjects were less than truthful about their dependence on child ...”

“... at Manderley whom she also called Robert. The fortunes of Moper, who at this stage had risen to be Major-General Sir Frederick Browning, in fact provide some of the most interesting parts of the book. (He had other nicknames, acquired before his marriage, but they were neither strained nor foolish: one was Boy, to distinguish him from his father who was also a ...”

“... The action spans fifteen years, from the end of the Depression to the advent of Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles. Vidal keeps track of the major political developments but concentrates on the inter-generational conflicts between Burden and Blaise and their respective children. From time to time a famous politician ...”

“... pages of rebuttal only this time under Burt’s name. The second example dates from 1963, when John McLeish’s book The Science of Behaviour charged (almost a decade before Kamin) that Burt had inadequately described his twin studies, and called his research methodology ‘shocking’. Burt promptly ran a scathing and nitpicking review, three times longer ...”

“... of the realist aesthetic. The appearance of Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour, however, forced a major change in the terms of the discussion. Godard, Rivette and even Rohmer (one of the staunchly conservative set) discerned – and praised – a decisive break with traditional narrative and ‘sequence-shot’ naturalism, with Rivette and Godard resurrecting ...”

“... the bar, the tavern, the queue, the street. In The End of the Line, as in much of his later work, major historical forces appear only as incidental extras in narratives driven by individual wants and needs. Great public events ‘always seemed to have a way of coinciding with paltry, semi-private ones. History had a disconcerting habit of operating on several ...”

“... this complex web of interests and arriving at a settlement will not be easy. According to John Stockwell, who ran the CIA’s covert programme in Angola during the Seventies, it was the Agency which laid the first stone in what is now an edifice of superpower rivalry. In Stockwell’s account, the Americans began funding the FNLA, one of three ...”

“... greeted enthusiastically abroad, did the French public become aware that they had a historian of major importance among them. It was only when a television series was made about his work that he became a national figure. At the Collège de France, he was outside the university system. At the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme (the defiantly modern monument he ...”

“... of duty and the hope that he could shield colleagues more successfully from within the system. John Heilbron called his biography of Planck The Dilemmas of an Upright Man. Stern takes the same line, gloomily but fairly recording Planck’s small victories and large surrenders. To conflicts of conscience was added personal tragedy. One son had been killed ...”