“... like Churchill’s riposte – ‘Young man, these all seem to me to be positive advantages’ – may have been somewhat improved in the course of subsequent repetition, it nonetheless tells us much about Lloyd. Such anecdotes did not attach themselves to Eden or Macmillan, still less would either man have encouraged their propagation. Indeed Eden later ...”

“... a case which had been described as ideal for the purpose, with Iraq so dependent on imports. One may suspect that the most powerful motive for this was impatience, but there was another much more respectable one: concern for the Kuwaitis, who were being subjected to a senselessly cruel regime of looting, pillaging, torture and murder. A vivid account of life ...”

“... has its moments of Fauréesque harmonic sweetness. At the same time, Fauré’s boldest gestures may equally well be felt to refer backwards as well as forwards. Of the last, and ‘with the Sixth, incontestably the most moving and inspired’, of the series of 13 Nocturnes, Nectoux observes: ‘The chromatic counterpoint and the dissonances caused by ...”

“... its collar. She recognised her collar, but never made it the object of sweet dreams. Dog-like she may have been in her devotion to her husband, Sergei Efron, but the only thing that ever truly concerned her was, as she herself wrote, to make human speech convey the inarticulate noises of instinctive emotion. The phatic protolanguage of the groan and the ...”

“... became a cult classic of sorts, especially among fly-fishermen, before it gained general fame when Robert Redford released his film of it in 1992, two years after Maclean had died at the age of 87. At his death he had left an almost completed manuscript, Young Men and Fire, which the editors of the Chicago University Press prepared for ...”

“... observatory) would be ‘sufficiently capacious to receive five millions of the dead, where they may repose in perfect security’. The scheme foundered, but if anyone feels like reviving it, I’d be happy to make a contribution in return for a guaranteed place somewhere near the pinnacle. Failing that, I thought I would after all settle for the shared ...”

“... mess were Ovide Mercredi, chief of the Assembly of First Nations in Canada; Joe Kennedy, son of Robert (we were promised Ted), and Rigoberta Menchú, who never turned up on schedule. An air of conspiracy descended on the press room. Grizzled pros talked out of the sides of their mouths, and diagrams were furtively copied. As the ceasefire went on, the ...”

“... formidable rationalist who destroys the faith of the hapless clerical hero of Mrs Humphry Ward’s Robert Elsmere. At the age of 38, Pattison narrowly missed becoming Rector of Lincoln in an election which he has described in a manner that makes the late C.P. Snow’s account of a somewhat similar affair seem milk-and-water stuff. Pattison took refuge in ...”

“... no word for understatement. She won prizes but less international recognition than her warm friend Robert Lowell, who consistently celebrated her: Dear Elizabeth, Half New-Englander, half fugitive Nova Scotian, wholly Atlantic sea-board – Unable to settle anywhere, or live Our usual roaring sublime. Elizabeth Bishop certainly never roared. In this ...”

“... two extra hours of Downton-free life. This latest crop of period narratives probably began with Robert Altman’s film Gosford Park (2001): at best, a mildly amusing self-conscious pastiche, though it wasn’t clear why a film-maker who could produce Nashville and Short Cuts would bother. The writer credited with Gosford Park was the now ennobled Julian ...”

“... had been followed by the murder in London of ‘the Italian Boy’, a victim of body traders who may have been serial killers. The New Poor Law, she argued, worked in tandem with the Anatomy Act by herding the poor into workhouses that prefigured Nazi concentration camps. Together, they streamlined the anatomy business and inflicted the ultimate stigma on ...”

“... self-dismemberment?) What she wants now is to become a hybrid of Flip and the land artist Robert Smithson, who made his mark on Utah’s topography with his immense coiling earthwork, Spiral Jetty. As Reno explains to her New York boyfriend, Sandro Valera (an older, successful minimalist artist and heir to the Valera motorcycle and tyre fortune), the ...”

“... The ground was prepared by an authoritative report commissioned by Princeton’s president, Robert Goheen, and drafted by Gardner Patterson, an economist at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. Both men’s political instincts and diplomatic skills were tested to the limit when the report reached sceptical alumni, whose ...”

“... with amendments in the 1660s and 1690s, they ‘belonged’ to Pangbourne, where they began (they may even have had a settlement certificate to prove it, though few such certificates survive). The ratepayers of Pangbourne were legally required to ensure that the Soundys did not starve to death. The ratepayers of Battersea would provide so long as Pangbourne ...”

“... Mark Honigsbaum is fascinated by fever trees. The phrase may bring to mind ‘the great, grey-green, greasy Limpopo River, all set about with fever trees’. But Honigsbaum is not interested in Kipling’s trees, or in the beautiful flat-topped acacias of the Kenyan rift valley, which are called ‘fever trees’ because they grow in malarial districts ...”