“... verification measures, including remote sensor monitoring, overflights and ‘national technical means’ (a euphemism for spy satellites). But whenever the US raised the possibility of on-site inspections, the Soviet Union would protest, believing that teams of inspectors visiting sensitive sites would be used as a cover for intelligence-gathering. For the ...”

“... for example, or Maureen Forrester – and then follow this by listening to a countertenor, David Daniels, for example, or Andreas Scholl, or Iestyn Davies (or go on YouTube and listen to a recording of the last castrato, Alessandro Moreschi, who died in 1922, singing the Bach-Gounod ‘Ave Maria’, with what Feldman called a vibrato that is ‘often ...”

“... an advocate, at the Oxford Union, of the birch and stocks; Chris Huhne, later energy secretary in David Cameron’s cabinet; Jeremy Hunt, the current health secretary. Johnson liked teaching and had a taste for the rough and tumble. His great day was not as a young man who worried about apartheid, or a feisty libertarian outnumbered by big French Stalinists ...”

“... gets to a defining concept in thinking about Kraftwerk is ‘retro-futurism’, by which he means a form of nostalgia for a ‘future that was never realised, or to put it another way, a future whose unfulfilled promises haunt the present’. This feels a bit retro itself – it’s almost exactly how ‘hauntology’ was posed on blogs written by Mark ...”

“... to investigate whether and how it was possible to modify an individual’s behaviour by covert means’. Under cross-examination he displayed a vagueness that for some recalled Jozsef Mindszenty’s show trial, shot through with a streak of paranoia: ‘I feel victimised … My name is selectively left on released documents where all or most others are ...”

“... morning Isaiah Berlin and Stephen Spender) and wants to photograph me outside. ‘Outside’ means that eventually I find myself perched up a tree in Hyde Park. Avedon’s assistants bustle round with lights, Avedon himself scarcely bothering to look through the lens, just enquiring from time to time where the edge of the frame is. He explains he wants ...”

“... fully recognises the relation between valuable products (grain, coal, timber, manufactures) and means of transportation. He makes us feel the nature of the road, at times appealing to the reader’s sensual imagination, even to the fascination of discomfort. ‘From this town of Guilford, the road to Farnham is very remarkable, for it runs along west from ...”

“... where he spent the first 19 years of his life: a life whose adventures are mainly, though by no means solely, intellectual and geistig. Among his grandfather’s guests at Redmond Manor he met Henry Raeburn, who painted Sir Francis Marbot (1803, now at the Tate) and Lady Catherine (1804, Edinburgh, National Gallery of Scotland); William Turner and Sir ...”

“... little emerges by way of significant departure: Matthews provides a more lively-looking syntax by means of a rapid sprinkling of minor stops, and generally by punctuating a little more freely. Compare the transcriptions of the entry for 5 January 1666 – first, the version by Bright in Wheatley’s edition: 5th. I with my Lord Bruncker and Mrs Williams by ...”

“... clubs and coffee-houses of London’s blossoming West End, and the perfect clownish counterfoil to David Garrick’s smouldering tragic hero. In his heyday in the 1760s, a summer season at the Haymarket theatre earned his company up to £5000, which may be multiplied a hundredfold for its value today. He had a townhouse on Suffolk Street, round the corner from ...”

“... as educated non-Jews was the precondition of joining modern civilisation, and the most immediate means of desegregation. However, the passion of emancipated Jews for the national language and culture of the gentile countries in which they lived was all the more intense, because in so many cases they were not joining, as it were, long-established clubs but ...”

“... Nixon would never have been able to achieve the ‘New Majority’ he dreamed of. But to do so by means of economic concessions – previously the only way politicians imagined working-class voters might be wooed – would threaten his business constituency. So Nixon ‘stood the problem on its head’, as Cowie says in Nixon’s Class Struggle (2002), ‘by ...”

“... where the lobotomy on Betsy was carried out but identifies the doctor responsible as Marcel David. This authorises her, with an exaggeration most will forgive, to link his name with Freeman’s as two mobile men immobilising women who made the mistake of not knowing their place.In the book’s most startling passage Yon breaks off her researches and ...”

“... book, ‘backed by a reference to an interview with someone whose credibility we have no means of assessing.’ When a second edition came out in 1982, he returned with even more pepper, lamenting Ellmann’s gullible readiness to accept what Kenner called ‘the Irish Fact’, meaning ‘anything they tell you in Ireland’. Kenner took Ellmann’s ...”