“... secret’, like the recipe for Coca-Cola. And she formed a corporate board ready to go to war with Quest and LabCorp: Henry Kissinger; Sam Nunn, who had served as chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee; George Shultz, the former secretary of state, one of the begetters of the Bush doctrine of pre-emptive ...”

“... have an opinion about it. Lancaster was no egalitarian, he mourned the passing of the upper middle class and the dwindling influence of the Anglican church, but he had the English dislike of experts and ‘the vast army of salaried culture-hounds’ who had introduced to Britain that hitherto exclusively foreign concept, the intelligentsia. Pundits, he ...”

“... a favourite curiosity being the fact that free Negroes . . . had owned other Negroes before the War between the States. The pamphlet on slave-owning Negroes went through ten printings . . . Five of them were in the Library of Congress in 1994 when the remaining two pamphlets were sold as part of a collection of black memorabilia owned by a black man in ...”

“... brains and poison raindrops. The scenario might have seemed twee and over-familiar – middle-class person escapes to the countryside to find himself – were it not for Buckmaster’s madness, and his desire to be madder still. ‘Perhaps I am losing my mind,’ he says: ‘I do hope so.’ He isn’t only running away, he’s trying to find ...”

“... of professional philosophers, take as their frame of reference the ancient doctrine of the just war which has inspired most attempts to create international laws of war. Resort to force should have a cause sufficiently just to override the moral ugliness of war. There should be a ...”

“... has spun off various lengthy by-products, such as a 732-page study of The Supreme Commander: The War Years of General Dwight D. Eisenhower, a five-volume edition of Eisenhower’s war papers, and special studies of Eisenhower and Berlin and even Ike’s Spies: Eisenhower and the Espionage Establishment. Dr Ambrose’s ...”

“... had anything to teach the West was eradicated, Haslam tells us, by the Soviet victory in World War Two. When Carr began writing his monumental History of Soviet Russia in the 1950s, the Soviet Union could be seen as a striking success story, with rising industrial output and improving living standards. Born into the middle ...”

“... Alun Lewis is usually remembered as a war poet or, more precisely, as a soldier poet. ‘All Day It Has Rained’ is familiar to those who know nothing else about its author and to some who don’t usually read poetry. Ian Hamilton edited a selection of Lewis’s work, and there is a good biography by John Pikoulis ...”

“... the illegals in immigrant neighbourhoods; it targets those who have strayed into middle and upper-class areas, where the residents are less welcoming. Dawners generally don’t kill. They break a few limbs in lightning-quick strikes. Last September a Dawn truck driver stabbed an Athenian rapper named Pavlos Fyssas to death in Piraeus. The uncharacteristic ...”

“... In 2001, Blair told the journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who had been investigating Putin’s war crimes in Chechnya, that ‘it’s my job as prime minister to like Mr Putin.’ (Politkovskaya was murdered in Moscow in 2006, on Putin’s birthday.) In Putin’s People, Catherine Belton describes many occasions when the Russian president was confirmed in ...”

“... Nathalie Sarraute had her own, esoteric way of doing well at school. When, at her Paris lycée, her class was asked whether anyone had read War and Peace, the 13-year-old Nathalie (née Natalya Tcherniak, in Russia), did not want to say that she had. She was fearful: not of advertising how grown-up her reading had already become but of what she might have to listen to should her teacher ‘dare to touch’ the book and the ineffable Tolstoy be invested by the crass discourse of a pedagogue ...”

“... by political bias and that in any case he lacked any ear for the rhythms of English poetry. The War of Paulin’s Ear shows no signs of dying down. He is locked in public combat with Craig Raine, who commissioned this anthology of political verse. Well, this quarrel will doubtless do no harm to the book’s sales. But what is all the fuss about? On a ...”

“... as Cook finds. Potter’s concerns were those of his time and place: the new fluidity of social class in his youth, the desire to bring art to the masses, the foregrounding of sexuality as a key to discontent, the loss of faith and certainty in what seemed like iconoclastic times and an attempt to reclaim a God of some sort as life proceeded. The threads ...”

“... its politics of racial uplift, its condescending attitude towards the experiences of working-class Black people. And his association with the Harlem Renaissance is further complicated by his absence during the height of the movement: between 1919 and 1934, he spent only two years in America.The Vieux Port taught him a lot. The cast of characters in his ...”

“... a nice thing if it had, given its place in England’s emotional life at every level and in every class. Orwell was an old Etonian, so he knew all about that, but he also spent a certain amount of time in the vicinity of Wigan Pier, where a succession of drag artists have kept working-class audiences howling into their ...”