“... neither. Why not? Why was there no second wave of civil wars, no further shift in dynasty enforced by foreign troops, and no revolution from below? Such questions are enduring. Answers and approaches to them, by contrast, have shifted markedly over time. Up to the 1960s, Britain’s exceptional achievements abroad in this ...”

“... Browning is in high favour once again, or promises to be. Has not A.S. Byatt, CBE, declared him ‘one of the very greatest English poets’? In a switch to fighting talk, she adds that ‘his greatness has never been fully acknowledged or described ... in part because he is difficult to docket in terms of the usual literary discussions of Victorian Poetry ...”

“... has a long nave with plentiful seating and many smaller circumjacent chapels. In the next decade, David Riesman and Gerald Grant continued in the same vein but added: ‘Occasionally a visionary from one of the side altars will seize the main pulpit ... to lecture the vulgar utilitarians and then march off to found a rival church.’ Among the Luthers they ...”

“... the National Curriculum, the Education Minister John Patten infuriated the teaching profession by announcing an immediate review of the Statutory Order for English. No sooner had the review been announced than Mr Patten and his fellow ministers did their best to pre-empt its outcome. They let it be known that their ...”

“... Boswell on the occasion of needling his famous friend with the news that the atheist philosopher David Hume had died well and without repentance. ‘The horror of death, which I had always observed in Dr Johnson, appeared strong tonight.’ Sherwin Nuland a surgeon from Yale, speaks to the Johnson in each of us, to our hunger for knowledge of our inevitable ...”

“... Powers addresses in his extensive study of German atomic research: a question finally answered by the recent publication of the secretly recorded conversations between Heisenberg and the other German atomic physicists interned at Farm Hall, near Huntingdon, in the summer of 1945.Heisenberg’s leading role among German physicists stems from the ...”

“... altogether, so far as the 20th century is concerned. If there is a useful critical question to be answered about MacDiarmid at this stage, it is perhaps not so much how great he was but what sort of poet he was. To this question the studies under review contribute in different manners and in different degrees. The outstanding one seems to me to ...”

“... John Paul had shown no signs of ill-health during his brief reign, and very soon it began to be rumoured that he had been poisoned. Having inadvertently landed themselves with the wrong man for the job, a man who seemed to be about to sanction birth control and who had once remarked that God was more of a mother than a ...”

“... Historians of any society have to learn to be wary of the accepted myths of their subject. Sometimes these bogus visions of the past are deliberately created or fostered by the governing group. Sometimes they come from an educated but perhaps unsophisticated middle class, anxious to gain historical sanction for its security and power ...”

“... using phrases like ‘collective Arab narrative’ in their conversations with Said at the UN, and David Gilmour, one of the authors under review, is equally improbably described as being frustrated by the ‘non-narrative character of Lebanon’s problems’. Reports of events since the fall of Beirut are described as ...”

“... To judge by the reaction of some of his staunchest admirers, many readers of Gabriel Garcia Marquez were truly taken aback by what he wrote about the alleged behaviour of British troops in the trenches during the Little War for the Falklands. It’s surprising, however, that most of his disenchanted fans live not in England but in Spain, where the offending article appeared ...”

“... severe flooding of the capital, but – more significantly – as a reply to the challenge offered by another poem: Mickiewicz’s satire on the town as the evil headquarters of imperial oppression, the icy giant of the North. ‘Naturally I despise my country from head to foot,’ wrote Pushkin, ‘but I am not going to let a foreigner get away with sharing ...”

“... to menacing the world from behind a corporate curtain, his frailty suddenly apparent. Assailed by a protester with a foam pie, Rupert had to be protected by his much younger wife. Interrupting James’s own strangulated apology with a paternal squeeze of the arm, he wanted one ...”

“... There he built Joseph Smith a temple that was not quite completed when the prophet was shot dead by a mob. Another mob burned down Miles’s temple, and he fled Nauvoo with his family. Hounded by animals, Indians and more mobs, they made their way to Salt Lake City, where he helped Brigham Young build a temple that still ...”

“... of being the one great power which could in no possible circumstance acquire European territory by war, but it still did not want Russia to do so, and it became a cardinal point of British policy that Turkey should be protected for as long as possible, which plainly made Russia a potential antagonist. Shortly after the ...”