“... removed from the British Empire to become a single state (doubtless under a pro-Nazi leader like John Vorster), but Germany would take Northern Rhodesia to act as a bridge between its east and west African territories. Germany would take over all of Britain’s positions in the Middle East, including its oil concessions and the Suez Canal, and also annex the ...”

“... But the cultural Cold War has proved more difficult to assess; no single study can match John Lewis Gaddis’s We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (1997). Unlike power bloc politics, cultural matters were bound up with local histories, deep-seated traditions and long-standing stereotypes. It is worth asking, indeed, whether there was such a ...”

“... he does not call these pieces poems.’ From the heart of the London literary establishment Sir John Squire described The Waste Land as a poem for which ‘a grunt would serve equally well.’ Eliot’s 1925 collection, which included ‘Gerontion’, seemed to Squire ‘obscure so inconsequent . . . Why on earth he bothers to write at all is difficult to ...”

“... eating. A number of summers ago my friend Eli and I had dinner at a trendy downtown pizza place (John F. Kennedy Jr was at the next table). After we’d finished, and I was halfway out the door, Eli called me back, in a strangely delighted tone of voice, to show me the dead, foot-long sewer rat (grey, oily belly distended, chest flattened, long yellow ...”

“... Llandaff. The secret of his puzzling resignation probably lies in a story told in the memoirs of John Addington Symonds, a pupil at Harrow at that time, which were not published till the 1960s. There, a simple tale of blackmail is revealed. For all Vaughan’s intense sermonising on the evils of homosexuality (in one purple passage he referred to a pederast ...”

“... instruction book, known as the ‘Bible’, 750 pages long, weighing four pounds. In 1999, John Reckert, a senior executive of Burger King, explained at a conference the relationship between technology and employees. ‘We can develop equipment that only works one way,’ he said. ‘There are many different ways today that employees can abuse our ...”

“... foreign. The bombing of four Canadians made them aware of errors in targeting, while the trial of John Walker, a white American Muslim, for taking up arms against the United States, highlighted the significance of the confusion. Walker’s defence was that he had joined a Taliban-led jihad against ‘un-Islamic factions’ inside Afghanistan before the events ...”

“... by essayistic riffs – on hotel minibars, on videophones, on the semiotics of street manners in major European cities, what have you – the riffs always expertly blending the sentimental and the Cultural-Studies-theoretical; a tendency to elongate into lists whenever possible (of the ‘there were ten things that Brian really disliked’ kind); kooky ...”

“... Americans, is close to hero-worship, treats FDR’s endless deceptions and tricks with indulgence. John Steinbeck, whom FDR once persuaded to do some spying for him in Mexico, came to the conclusion that he liked mystery, subterfuge and indirect tactics for their own sake. But maybe, like many privileged people, he didn’t see why the world shouldn’t be ...”

“... a deal to do, as any of them should be able to execute it. It’s easy to see why brokers are the major force in City entertainment, ever ready to take traders out to the local bars, restaurants or strip clubs in the hope of winning their favour. It’s a strange experience to go drinking with these people, with their eagerness to please and their ...”

“... also a question of how buoyant one can be in the face of such things. In an early interview with John Haffenden, Muldoon was asked: ‘Why do you think the notion of alternative lives is peculiarly fetching, philosophically attractive, to your imagination?’ He replied: ‘I think it’s central. One of the ways in which we are most ourselves is that we ...”

“... with independent central banks joining constitutional courts and election commissions as major checks on the power of the parliamentary majority. None chose Westminster. And now, after a decade of constitutional revolution in Britain, the Westminster model has died in the land which gave it birth. Yet it was not the old Montesquieu model that killed ...”

“... scholarship, has the better of this debate. It has been convincingly shown that the martyrologist John Foxe’s admiring account was based on good evidence. In less than a fortnight of the spring of 1536, and almost in two days, the world of Anne Boleyn fell apart. The queen was charged and found guilty of multiple adultery, and all too soon she, together ...”

“... engineers – under the pressure of extraordinary circumstances are compelled to act like heroes. John le Carré once called him ‘the source on which we all draw’. Alan Furst has been drawing on him for nearly twenty years: ‘The first paragraph of Kingdom of Shadows is a direct citation of Eric Ambler,’ he told an interviewer when that novel came out ...”

“... McCabe and Dermot Bolger constitutes a ‘new direction in Irish fiction’ is less certain. The major trope of Irish fiction is certainly no longer Modernist paralysis but change – Tóibín’s second novel, The Heather Blazing, is a very good example of this. But, as the novel also shows, that change still turns on the contradictions that lay at the ...”