“... Years. No true imaginative process has occurred. Virginia Woolf simply looked at Vita Sackville-West as she looked at Bogey Harris, however much the former may be dressed up in a style and a fancy. There is nothing to be done with Orlando, beyond seeing her in this way, just as there is nothing to be done with Bogey Harris beyond seeing him at the ...”

“... carried a ‘Letter from Paris’. The author had gone to Israel soon after the embarrassment of Anthony Eden’s ‘police action’ at Suez: she taught at the Hebrew University, wrote film scripts for the Jewish Agency, joined in an excursion to Russia. She was made aware of Israel’s ambivalent attitude towards Jews of the Diaspora, of a different way of ...”

“... printed letters without his permission: ‘Don’t do it again.’ He meant business. He wrote to Anthony Burgess in June 1988: ‘I hear you have been attacking me rather severely on a French television programme ... You have thought it relevant to attack me because of my age (I don’t see the point). You should have checked your facts. I happen to be 83 ...”

“... Labour the Liberals had found themselves confined to the Celtic fringes of Wales, Scotland and the West Country and it had been their recurring dream to break through into suburbia. This was the greatest promise the SDP held, yet in 1983 three of their MPs (Jenkins, Kennedy and Maclennan) were elected from Scotland and one (Owen) from the ...”

“... into an expression of American hegemony, with Britain reduced to the status of the other West European states. If Britain still retains some independence from the United States, it is mainly through membership of a European community. When did the flaws in the special relationship first begin to appear? There were many symptoms of strain in the first ...”

“... is discreet and business-like. By and large, they’re anonymous. Most people in the developed West hide from the reality of death, and those who don’t, those who make a living from it, are hidden from us. Hayley Campbell wants us to peer into this strange world, not least because it’s where we’re all heading – 55 million of us annually, more than ...”

“... from Brittany), was no longer bisected, like the Korean peninsula, by a potentially hostile east-west frontier. So Camden’s engraved title page displayed an undivided island, with only the eastern portion of a literally marginalised Ireland. Yet his book was entitled: Britannia, siue, florentissimorum regnorum, Angliae, Scotiae, Hiberniae, ex intima ...”

“... conversion, with the much weaker East German currency being accorded parity with the strong West German mark. The immediate appeal of such a policy to East German voters was obvious, and the proposal was also supported by Brandt. In the longer term, however, as Lafontaine then argued, currency parity would lead to industry becoming uncompetitive in East ...”

“... cartoon called Oumpah-pah, featuring a Flatfoot Indian living in a remote village in the Wild West that was bravely holding out against the palefaces, but struck lucky when they launched their ancient Gaulish version of Oumpah-pah in 1959 in the first issue of the comic Pilote (which, like Mad, was aimed at adults rather than children). Pilote had the ...”

“... became a critic, joining a group of officials from previous administrations – Richard Holbrooke, Anthony Lake, Zbigniew Brzezinski – in blaming Bush for undermining the post-World War Two system of international alliances and treaties which had institutionalised American dominance. But the neocon ascendancy in Washington meant that calls for a more ...”

“... apt to rise above the call of loyalty to the House of Commons, and to the democratic process. Sir Anthony Kershaw, instead of asking ministers questions arising from the document, handed it to the Defence Secretary, Michael Heseltine, and his department. Let no one kid themselves that, in our system, Select Committees of the House of Commons with an in-built ...”

“... no place in the South African model; industrialisation had cut them off from their rural origins. Anthony Sampson, who spent a creative four-year stint as editor of Drum in the early Fifties, described as a ‘genuine and massive misunderstanding’ the Afrikaner belief ‘that the blacks, like the Afrikaners, wanted to return to their tribal roots and ...”

“... was new in Look Back in Anger, as well as its new style in indignation. At the same time, in the West End, the curtain was still going up on Terence Rattigan’s Separate Tables. As soon as they saw the first act of Osborne’s play, the audience at the Royal Court suddenly and spontaneously knew that Rattigan’s already famous piece was ...”

“... Crow met John Bull. The British Cabinet groaned at the prospect of an invasion of black troops. Anthony Eden wanted them sent elsewhere and claimed they would be unable to withstand the British weather. It was important not to upset America, but equally important not to go along with American ideas of ‘JimCrow’ segregation. Lord Simon rashly boasted ...”

“... politics of 18th-century Protestant Dissent – the very spearhead of English radicalism – since Anthony Lincoln’s monograph in 1958. But if British historians are more irreligious than their American counterparts, they are at least less whiggish. Too many American historians look too simplistically at the English Civil War/Revolution for pointers towards ...”