“... those that Mandelstam might have seen on his long, arduous journey towards a prison transit camp, as he crossed the steppe. The poet concludes by reminding us that tragedy watches over everything, ‘has all under regard’. Tragedy is here made to sound a little like the police state, keeping tabs on all its citizens. Yet Hill properly marks our ...”

“... and the locomotive is used there to wheel up shot, shell and other implements of war … from the camp in the Crimea, to the War Office in London, the Commander in Chief now reports direct the state of the siege every few minutes … a telegraph submarine cable, 301 miles long, is laid in the bed of the Black Sea, stretching from the monastery of St ...”

“... who was born in the year of the Bolshevik revolution, remains broadly committed to the Marxist camp – a fact worth mentioning as it would be easy to read this book without realising it. This is because of its judiciousness, not its shiftiness. Its author has lived through so much of the political turbulence he portrays that it is easy to fantasise that ...”

“... lettering, as though it were quite normal. Carpenters had recently restored the concentration camp, and surrounding wire and watch-towers, the huts. More than authentic, the place was in working order. On that late afternoon, under lowering snow-clouds, men and women were stepping out of a number of buses. Condensation steamed over the bus windows. Drinks ...”

“... the control of the ‘father’ of the British bomb (the bombs of every country have fathers), William Penney. Justifying the expense and effort was not difficult. The Soviet Union blockaded Berlin in 1948, and had the bomb by 1949. The Cold War was on. It wouldn’t do to leave the Americans with the only Western deterrent. At the same time the knowledge ...”

“... of Puritan sects, whose quarrels disposed some of them to locate Antichrist within the Protestant camp. Yet Anti-Popery remained near the surface of English politics, and one might have expected to find anti-semitism there too. Certainly Jews and Catholics faced a common threat, for if Jews were believed to have any Christian credentials, those credentials ...”

“... committed than Jonson to the royalist or ‘court’ party. Shakespeare had at least one patron (William Herbert, third Earl of Pembroke) with substantial Puritan affiliations. He himself must have been aware that the public theatres had enemies – and supporters – in both the Puritan and Anglican camps. Miss Heinemann sets out to distinguish Puritan ...”

“... of the mid-Forties got the Third Programme right straight off. The BBC’s Director-General, William Haley, credited himself with having created the network by two decisions. Programmes should take as long as they needed to, and not be curtailed to make way for, say, a fixed news bulletin. Schedulers were urged to be as creative as they liked with an ...”

“... his salary in 1986 was $550 million, which, on the Buchan-approved capitalisation model of Sir William Petty (20 times one’s annual income), made his personal worth about $11,000 million. Just as we are deciding that this is an achievement to wonder at, Buchan adds with some severity that ‘fortunes made in finance ... require little intelligence and ...”

“... Miltonic; in later years, Robert Morehead transformed Dante into a second Spenser, while Thomas William Parsons made him out to be ‘stately and solemn’ in the manner of ‘Gray and Dryden’. T.S. Eliot’s essay of 1929 argues against such Anglocentric and Italocentric definitions, but only by ascribing even greater consistency and homogenising power ...”

“... the planned assassination appeared gratuitous. So Amonasro has disappeared, Amneris has gone to camp, and Radamès is as useless as ever. (His suggestion to Aida that they sail off to an isle in the Nile where they can be happy together she rightly rejects as impractical.) With Verdi’s dramatic structure thus in shambles, the Aida character must now be ...”

“... ancestors. Visions of future happiness are all very well; but happiness is a feeble, holiday-camp kind of word, resonant of manic grins and multicoloured jackets, not least when compared with the kind of past which, as Marx commented, weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. Benjamin was not wholly sceptical of the future, as Fredric Jameson ...”

“... dividends. Hengshui High School in Hebei province is an extreme case; it operates like a military camp, with physical punishments and emotional abuse that have reportedly driven several students to suicide. Yet anxious parents continue to send their children there, in the hope that, once the scores are posted, the ordeal will have been worth it. In spite of ...”

“... in England were spent in my grandparents’ little brick bungalow, at the foot of Caesar’s Camp, near Folkestone. (Their house and lane have since disappeared – razed to make way for the stark, moonscaped run-up to the Channel Tunnel.) It was in those lonely, quiet days – the clock ticking on the mantel-piece, the adults discoursing in another room ...”

“... we could go through; we passed by many hundreds of lorries and tents, the white troops in one camp, the black in another. An old woman in the village said that they preferred the black; they were quieter and more polite. Is it not an irony that the English countryman prefers the ‘black trash’ to the ‘lords of creation’? We emerged from the park at ...”