“... very different. Hitler was losing the war. The Germans had occupied Vichy France as well as the north, and Pétain, its head of state, had done nothing to stop them. The Resistance (once dismissed as feckless Red troublemakers) was growing much stronger, and the hunting down of ‘collaborators’ seemed just round the corner. That Christmas, the last ...”

“... done that after all. Instead she gave a tasty story about gun-running between the South and North of Ireland. By the afternoon a commander (Huntly) and a chief superintendent (Nevill) were up from London again to ask her about a bomb at Euston Station in September 1973. Oh, she said, she hadn’t planted that, but she had delivered the bombs for ...”

“... Perceptively, Professor Gilbert stresses that the background was not Wales tout court, but rural North Wales. Political leaders who are connected with a particular group are apt to dramatise their identification with it: they are too like actors to resist making the most of any fat part in which the celestial director has cast them. Flamboyantly as Disraeli ...”

“... the status for cemeteries that service African townships such as Alexandra and Soweto, to the north and south of the city. Cemeteries can, however, move up – and presumably down – the league table. Alexandra, which once had the unfortunate distinction of occupying the only ‘E’ slot ever allocated by the municipality, was recently upgraded to ...”

“... The intention was to find a practical means of honouring his work. I was taken to a tiny North London council flat, and there sitting in the middle of its cramped living-room, I encountered a very ancient and frail-looking man, striking mainly for the large and antique ear-trumpet which he applied when straining to catch remarks addressed to him. I ...”

“... to give it? We live in a culture where belief in the supernatural is strong and growing. In 1660 Joseph Glanvil (quoted by Taylor) could write: ‘The present-day world treats all such stories with laughter and derision and is firmly convinced that they should be scorned as a waste of time and old wives’ tales ...’ But in 1977 a poll of American ...”

“... President of the United States.’ His popularity in the country, especially among Labour people north of the Trent, held up remarkably throughout much political misfortune and extended into his retirement. This was something which metropolitan comment tended to ignore. Wilson was an incorrigibly provincial man with the common touch, and that, I ...”

“... possession of a rarely seen film by Andrzej Wajda, Smuga cienia, from 1976. It is an adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s short, openly autobiographical novel The Shadow-Line (1916). Wajda conceived the film as a modest docudrama based on Conrad’s last mission at sea. The British government, in the thick of the First World War, had enlisted the ageing celebrity ...”

“... Miami Beach, the Keys. The constrictor-ridden Everglades, sugar and snakes. Or, indeed, G, way up north and bang inland, roughly equidistant from both coasts and the Georgia Line, unfashionable, ungarish, unfrivolous. No sherbet-coloured Deco or exercise-muscle on display here. Leathery, prairie, echt Florida, at just about the point where the orange groves ...”

“... in September 2003, and another into incidents that occurred in May 2004 at a British army base north of Basra, while a third inquiry has been requested on behalf of 102 other Iraqi citizens. Since Cameron’s announcement WikiLeaks has suggested that there may well be 15,000 hitherto unrecorded Iraqi deaths, leading the Guardian to request, under the ...”

“... or a kinder, gentler James Wood? In ‘Two Paths for the Novel’, she looked at books by Joseph O’Neill and Tom McCarthy. Realism, it seemed, was on the run, and it turned out that novels in English could still be vehicles for avant-garde ideas. Why not try to be James Joyce? A bit wobbly and lopsided by design, NW is a hotchpotch in five ...”

“... group founded by David Rockefeller to bring together policymakers, academics and journalists from North America, Western Europe and Japan – put out a controversial report in 1975 titled The Crisis of Democracy, which argued that an overload of welfare responsibilities was enervating democratic states. In much of Latin America military strongmen – Generals ...”

“... butchery of 1914-18. After directing six hours of intense artillery fire from emplacements just north of Gravelotte, the Prussians swarmed the French positions at Moscow Farm and Point du Jour. According to one account, they found the defendersfearfully torn and mutilated by the German shell; limbs and bodies were blown from thirty to fifty paces apart ...”

“... of nothing but Israel”.’ During that trip to the Middle East in July 1953, he toured North Africa, Egypt and Jordan, speaking, as he put it, ‘to Sheiks, fellahs and bubble pipe salesmen’ along the way. It doesn’t seem, at least from the written record, that he talked to any Israelis. Israel had taken in hundreds of thousands of refugees ...”

“... was an international best-seller. Not that constancy was a conspicuous feature of his career. Joseph Hall, ‘our English Seneca’, remarked that Lipsius was as constant as a chameleon. This mattered, for the true Stoic wishes to be judged by his life as much as by his writing. Stoic philosophy is a guide to conduct, and the philosopher, the man ...”