“... and Josephine abandoned their new house, and in the autumn of 1906 moved to 4 Marlborough Road, St John’s Wood, where they spent the rest of their lives. A photo taken in the back garden shows Chester wearing a suit, Josephine in a deckchair. It wasn’t Crag Head. The garden had a single pear tree, which they jokingly called ‘the orchard’. In 1908 ...”

“... he would have been disappointed. There was some half-hearted praise from Movement types, but when John Carey, for example, needed an honourable popular writer to batter the highbrows with in The Intellectuals and the Masses (1992), he turned to Arnold Bennett. Morgan’s biography had a memorable centrepiece: a description of the senile Maugham crapping on ...”

“... by reference to the legal principles which undoubtedly explain them the kinds of award made in major libel actions. There is nothing wrong with the argument that if this is the due result there is something wrong with the principles or the process that have produced it. Refusing to accept the objectionable outcome alongside the welcome one is not simply ...”

“... engine types, guidance systems and fuel consumption. In 1950, Eisenhower’s secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, had explained the inevitability of federation in terms that every adult Eritrean can retrieve, more or less correctly, from somewhere in the mental files: ‘From the point of view of justice, the opinions of the Eritrean people must receive ...”

“... charismatic, amoral outsider at the centre. The story got him the attention of the publisher John Farrar, who passed it to Edward Weeks at the Atlantic. Matthiessen was taken on as a client by ‘the toughest agent in town’. Bernice Baumgarten also represented John Dos Passos, Edna St Vincent Millay and Raymond ...”

“... wave of appointees also included one who was, in the words of an admirer, Europe’s equivalent of John Marshall, the patriarch of the Supreme Court in the US, responsible for establishing its authority across the land. Robert Lecourt was a leading politician in the French version of the Christian Democratic parties of Italy and Germany, the Mouvement ...”

“... work of the American E.D. Hirsch’s Core Knowledge Foundation, said to be a major influence on Gove. So long as your performance data look good and you did well in your most recent Ofsted inspection, the DfE doesn’t worry too much how you got there. (Both measures looked great at Park View until recently, which may be one reason things ...”

“... them, when they caught the wrong fish, to dump it.As I listened to Hardie I thought of something John Fenty, the local businessman who owns Grimsby Town football club, had told me a couple of days earlier: how he got his start in 1984 hiring transport out to a local trader who drove around the colliery villages inland, selling fish factory discards to ...”

“... If aid workers don’t want their organisations to become completely dependent on a few major donors, as some US NGOs already are, they must make their case through the media. Though some disguise this need better than others, and few are as outspoken about its necessity as Kouchner, aid workers are in the business of selling their organisations and ...”

“... 1934 (and was naturalised in 1938), it was taken semi-jocularly in many literary quarters to be a major item in that ongoing ‘punishment of England’ (‘Gott strafe England’) that had been on the German agenda since 1914.The composer Hanns Eisler records a meeting between Brecht and Zweig in London. Brecht, who ‘of course never read a line of ...”

“... goes without saying that it is essential to be in France’ – and Joseph Wechsberg did major damage to the magazine’s expenses budget by explaining what Michelin stars meant and then filing reports from every one of France’s three-star establishments. Alice B. Toklas wrote her Cookbook, she said, ‘for America’, partly to explain the ...”

“... Obama sought an effect of comparable solemnity in the speech of 26 August that declared the end of major combat operations in Iraq. In it he announced that the Iraq war ‘has made America safer’. Doubtless he felt a need, as he called the war to an official close, to appease and comfort the soldiers and their families who had sacrificed so much, but the ...”

“... the war’s ‘moral assets’. Certainly Pincher had imperial origins: the only child of a drum major in the Northumberland Fusiliers, he was born in the military cantonment at Ambala in Punjab – a birthplace he shares with Kim Philby, who arrived two years earlier. He’s proud to say that both parts of his name have their origins in old country ...”

“... to combat or contain it – or, as the realist theorists like the late Chalmers Johnson and John Mearsheimer demand, to make the United States dismantle its bases, get out of the rest of the world, and operate at a global level only if it is actually threatened as a country. Many realists in the United States argue that such a withdrawal is ...”

“... is partly because some of their number – Arthur Balfour, George Curzon and Wyndham – enjoyed major political careers, and partly because they generated an abundance of high-class anecdote, diligently archived by their descendants. They have, though, been rather unlucky in their champions, starting with themselves. In old age they struggled to justify ...”