“... 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 ...”

“... first peacetime, non-departmental intelligence organisation’.Fleming delivered the report to William ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan, a much decorated First World War veteran who had been lobbying Roosevelt to establish an American spy agency separate from the Navy, War and State Departments. A month later Donovan submitted his ‘Memorandum of Establishment of ...”

“... astonishment, never forgave him for showing such ‘weakness’. Neither did his friends. It took William Taubman almost twenty years to complete his wonderful Khrushchev: The Man and His Era. This Gorbachev biography took a mere 11. And yet it is in some ways an even more heavyweight product. The research is vast; the tracking down of published and ...”

“... Those condemned to this liminal existence looked back on the notoriously harsh Changi prison camp in Singapore, where they had first been incarcerated, as a haven of order and plenty. Lieutenant Watt was believed to have been killed in the defence of Singapore, the War Office informed his mother. Ten months later, a message came via the International Red ...”

“... it up, just go out there and kill Soviets.’ These orders came from a most peculiar American. William Casey, the CIA’s director from January 1981 to January 1987, was a Catholic Knight of Malta educated by Jesuits. Statues of the Virgin Mary filled his mansion, called ‘Maryknoll’, on Long Island. He attended mass daily and urged Christianity on ...”

“... occasioned by a wet Scottish summer.This is a bit unfair. The recent struggle for the right to camp on Dartmoor is a reminder that Scots should be glad of the 2003 Act, which, among other things, formalised the traditional right to roam and established a community right to buy. But change in the distribution of ownership has been painfully slow. A report ...”

“... We buy a luminous blue and white Victorian tile at Gabor Cossa which one of the partners thinks is William de Morgan but isn’t and then cross the road to the Fitzwilliam. I take in a chance selection of pictures, dictated by which happen to be in range of available banquettes, and in particular the Van Dyck portrait of Archbishop Laud. It’s hung beside one ...”

“... than a hundred pages to launch the French ‘philosophy of the concept’, composed in a prison camp in a few months in 1942. And Wittgenstein wrote the 80-page Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, his revolutionary critique of Russell and Frege, from the trenches of the First World War. It does nothing to belittle the achievements of Cavaillès and Wittgenstein ...”

“... began defining ‘The Playboy Philosophy’ – a kind of ‘hedonistic utilitarianism’, as William F. Buckley put it. The magazine was originally designed, Hefner admitted, as a ‘romantic reflection of earlier times’. His achievement was to associate sex with upward mobility by making his readers feel they were part of an elite gentlemen’s ...”

“... and inspired numerous copies and spin-offs.Few subjects or scenes were too ambitious or too camp to be treated as topics for a hippodrama. Audiences could see ‘Rocinante and Dapple flying to heaven on a cloud, blue-eyed cremello ghost horses carrying the spectres of defeated Indians, castles that go up in flames, Lady Godiva, horned horses, the ...”

“... of North America. Cook’s journals and the reports of other enlightened travellers, including William Marsden’s History of Sumatra (1783) and Arthur Young’s studies of French agriculture (1787-89), were intended as major contributions to knowledge. Marsden’s work was inspired by his regular attendance at the Royal Society’s ‘philosophical ...”

“... be the case, has caught on in a big way. It is all made up by the media, and by those faithful camp-followers of art who tell us on radio or TV what they were ‘trying to do’ when they wrote, painted or composed. The fashionably perceptive novel, like Julian Barnes’s memorable Flaubert’s Parrot, cannot find out what it is looking for, or what is ...”

“... story of the fall in paradise, and rewrites it in the bleakest terms. This is a book that makes William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, the most eminent of its literary forefathers, look like a study in innocence – perhaps because its undeviating gaze focuses on Eve, not Adam. Like Atwood, Wiggins places her fall in remembered history. Charlotte and ...”