“... of the name of Monro; and he told the story so often that he got the nickname of Tiger Conran’. George Downie (Downey), who died in Bengal in 1808, may have been equally keen to share it: in Travels in India a Hundred Years Ago (1893) Thomas Twining told of meeting in about 1800 a ‘Captain O’Donald’ who claimed to be one of those present at Munro’s ...”

“... side, the forthright T.H. Huxley was scarcely less dismissive. On the other hand, George Eliot – pseudonymously – admired Vestiges for its verve and scope; so did Florence Nightingale. What the book achieved was a kind of inoculation, which rendered its readers immune to future special pleading from the more vituperative clerics. In this ...”

“... can become Porto Davos. So who are these liberal communists? The usual suspects: Bill Gates and George Soros, the CEOs of Google, IBM, Intel, eBay, as well as court-philosophers like Thomas Friedman. The true conservatives today, they argue, are not only the old right, with its ridiculous belief in authority, order and parochial patriotism, but also the old ...”

“... he was for complicated reasons penniless and in practical terms homeless. His surviving brother, George, who would die of intestinal tuberculosis two decades later, was in America with his wife, Georgiana, trying to make his fortune; his dearest friend, Charles Armitage Brown, was on a summer walking tour, having frugally rented out the house he had been ...”

“... knew how to shoot, particularly compared with Europeans. According to one of its founders, George Wingate of the New York National Guard, ‘the Civil War had demonstrated with bloody clarity that soldiers who could not shoot straight were of little value. This situation, and the general ignorance concerning marksmanship which I found among our ...”

“... British Army. Since 1922 three hundred members of the RUC have been killed by the IRA. Constable George Chambers was shot on 15 December 1972 as he cleared the Kilwilkie estate in Lurgan because of a suspected car bomb. Constable Robert Megaw was shot when his patrol was ambushed in Edward Street in Lurgan. And Constable John Forsyth was blown up in Market ...”

“... meanwhile, pressures were mounting to deal with long-deferred domestic priorities. Neither George Bush nor Bill Clinton nor Boris Yeltsin could claim the authority in foreign affairs that Reagan and Gorbachev had commanded during the mid-Eighties – or, for that matter, their ability to think ahead, however superficially, about where they would like ...”

“... chief of defence staff, Sir Nicholas Houghton. Interviewed on 8 November, he confided to a purring Andrew Marr that the army was deeply vexed by Corbyn’s unilateralism, which damaged ‘the credibility of deterrence’. On the same show, Maria Eagle, a PLP sniper with a seat on the front bench as the shadow defence secretary, essentially told Marr that she ...”

“... of literary falconry and lightning perceptions the reportorial diligence and personal proximity of Andrew Kirtzman will have to do. A longtime New York journalist and television host, Kirtzman is the author of the thundering Rudy Giuliani: Emperor of the City (2000), to which this is the sequel. He possesses the salient advantage of having covered Giuliani ...”

“... singled out for praise by critics as diverse as Philip Toynbee, Francis King, Angus Wilson and Andrew Sinclair. All feel that he lacks the large audience he deserves. Yet the curious reader, anxious to gain more information about this somewhat enigmatic writer, of undoubted power (and above all vision), may easily find himself defeated. He is not even ...”

“... States’. The resolution was co-sponsored by three other Republicans: Lauren Boebert of Colorado, George Santos of New York (already disgraced) and Andrew Clyde, a multi-millionaire gun dealer from Georgia who had made the news by distributing AR-15 lapel pins to his colleagues in Congress. (Moore, who missed the ...”

“... There are maps both in Elizabeth Wilson’s book, which deals with bohemians in general, and in Andrew Barrow’s, which is a study of two in particular, but the street plans of Soho, Paris or Munich are not much use as a guide to the subject. Bohemia is a country of the mind, a flying island that may land anywhere and take off again just as quickly ...”

“... Mowlam remain outside. David Trimble was astonished but that’s how it always is with New Labour. Andrew Rawnsley records how the momentous decision that Britain would not join the euro during the current Parliament was taken. Aware of the increase in Euroscepticism from Philip Gould’s focus groups and daily readings of the Sun and the Mail, Gordon ...”

“... demand, and price rises will cool. If it takes a recession to achieve all this, then so be it. Andrew Bailey, governor of the Bank of England, has refused to state things quite so bluntly (as Karen Ward of JPMorgan Chase, a member of Hunt’s economic advisory council, did recently when she told the BBC’s Today programme that the bank’s decision-makers ...”

“... In ‘The Building of the Skyscraper’, a short poem which appeared in the Nation in 1964, George Oppen wrote: The steel worker on the girder Learned not to look down, and does his work And there are words we have learned Not to look at, Not to look for substance Below them. But we are on the verge Of vertigo. It’s hard to tell from this poem, published when Oppen was in his mid-fifties, or from any of his poems, what words he was thinking of ...”