“... hospitals in unmarked vans, and unloaded at back entrances. I heard about despair. I heard General John Abizaid, commander of US Central Command, say of the insurgents: ‘I don’t think that they’re growing. I think that they’re desperate.’ I heard about hope. I heard General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, say: ‘I came away ...”

“... by the end of it the mystery has been cleared up, The Assault has been spoken of by some – by John Gross, for example – as, on one level, like a detective novel. The resemblance, however, is weak. Anton Steenwijk does not seek out explanations for what happened on that terrible January night in 1945, they seek him out, unbidden and, consciously at ...”

“... over several years. For instance, I was almost sure I would tackle the distinguished art critic John Russell’s Paris (1960), ‘with photographs by Brassaï’, but never got past the pictures. I had slightly less confidence about Maxime Du Camp’s six-volume Paris, ses organes, ses fonctions et sa vie dans la seconde moitié du XIXe siècle ...”

“... service to establish Black units, while continuing the policy of segregation. Colonel Benjamin O. Davis, the highest ranking Black man in the army, was soon promoted to brigadier general (he remained the only African American general for the rest of the war). These changes led to a rise in Black enlistment. But Black draftees were often sent to training camps ...”

“... because of her interest in folklore and her knowledge of the area around Coole and its people. ‘John Synge, I and Augusta Gregory, thought/All that we did, all that we said or sang/Must come from contact with the soil.’ Much of Yeats’s work on Irish folklore was, as Foster points out, a collaboration with Lady Gregory.Lady Gregory also wrote ...”

“... and the question animating Mortals is whether she has fallen in love with a better man. Dr Davis Morel is a social reformer – he wants to de-Christianise Africa – with an encyclopedic mind and a touch of the crank about him. He resembles Nelson Denoon, with the important difference that Morel is black. (Not that race counts for as much as might be ...”

“... said my source. ‘And the trouble is – they’re both right.’ Now Johnson, Fox and David Davis, another whose career seemed well washed up, are in charge of our Euro negotiations. On the eve of the referendum, Johnson claimed that Europe’s ‘plan’ for us was like Hitler’s (Gove also used the Nazi analogy). Along with ...”

“... imports of these irresistible luxuries boomed too. On the whole, as the economic historian Ralph Davis concludes, ‘the consumer paid what he was asked.’ In any case, the government would have been miffed if the revenue had been seriously damaged, for these were still primarily revenue-raising taxes to pay for foreign wars. The effect on political ...”

“... There’s no question that O’Connor was doing the latter. Gooch reports that when the poet John Crowe Ransom selected one of her stories to read aloud in Iowa, he substituted the word ‘negro’ for the slur. O’Connor complained that he’d ruined the story. ‘The people I was writing about would never use any other word.’That O’Connor had a ...”

“... in 1962, filmed with Elizabeth Taylor playing Martha in 1966), referring to a line spoken by Bette Davis in King Vidor’s 1949 film Beyond the Forest, and one man’s sexual desire for another? How is it that an Australian readership in 2000 can be expected to pick up these distant references without their being explained? How are such links forged? The ...”

“... the invention of hieroglyphics by a god, in Plato’s story in the Phaedrus, refuses it, as John Ray recalled in these pages, ‘because it would ruin his subjects’ powers of memory and concentration’. Television stands accused of promoting apathy and inertia, pocket calculators of the decay of mental arithmetic. Often technology is blamed for an ...”

“... an ‘example of unfair burden sharing’ and ‘using a hatchet when you need a scalpel’ when John McCain proposed it during the campaign of 2008. In the same speech, Obama embraced the false analogy between federal budgets and household budgets, overlooking (for starters) the government’s control of taxation and the money supply. ‘Families across the ...”

“... counterproductive and ideologically driven’. In September, the Tory civil libertarian David Davis told Rupert Murdoch’s Sky News, an unlikely place to hear a defence of unions, that ‘there are bits of [the bill] which look OTT, like requiring pickets to give their names to the police force. What is this? This isn’t Franco’s Britain.’ The next ...”

“... or ‘neo-authoritarian’, what is indisputable is that it has unleashed what John Ganz has called a sense of ‘moral anarchy’, in which there are no longer any limits to the expression of sadism, or to its implementation as policy. Children are forcibly separated from their parents. Migrants from Venezuela are flown to a concentration ...”

“... Digest aphorisms, fake quotations from Lenin, and conspiracy theories spun by outfits like the John Birch Society. Well into the 1980s, he remained convinced that the Kremlin leadership was intent on turning the Caribbean into a ‘Red lake’. This evidence-free formulation was used to justify the administration’s secret and illegal arming of Contra ...”