“... of flesh and blood Lady H.’ But his longing for preferment, which supplies this biography with a major theme and inspires a concern with stipends and related matters, was never to be satisfied, though in 1831 he was created a Canon of St Paul’s. ‘I asked for nothing – never did anything shabby to procure preferment.’ The first of these claims is not ...”

“... as cyanin, pelargonin and malvin. This accomplishment opened the door for the synthesis of all the major glucoside anthocyanins. Robert Robinson, his professor, was rated something of a genius in synthetic organic chemistry, and the paragraphs in which Alex Todd describes Robinson’s research strategy are among the most valuable in his book. Todd completed ...”

“... uneasy and gives its political pronouncements all the congruity of powdered chalk. Every major media outlet claims to report the truth; they must. The whole business of American journalism is based on the certainty of Truth. What Doc realises is that Truth has become a commodity to be bought, sold or spun into whatever cloth the highest bidder ...”

“... dark grey suits (no pinstripes), blue plastic helmets, heavy-duty wellies and – apart from John Prescott – full zip millennial grins. Showcased by a long-focus lens that tactfully blurs the background of industrial dereliction. Britain is Working. Handson management. Optimism. Good humour. That stuff. A cross between a hobbled moon walk and Neil ...”

“... encased. Paragraphs are unindented, as is traditional for the opening of a book or one of its major constituent sections; this seems to characterise each one as a fresh start and weakens the sense of progressing drama. In the time frame of the book, Lizzie interacts with friends, colleagues and family members. She also experiences an election and a chaste ...”

“... On the side, he read sociology with Georg Simmel and phenomenology with Max Scheler. The one major extant example of Kracauer’s architectural work is Frankfurt’s Military Memorial Cemetery, which opened in 1916. Its tombs are arranged at right angles in allées lined by geometrically cut foliage; at the centre is a funerary cube bearing the names of ...”

“... that the partisans had selfish, sectional aims. There’s something in both views.Via Rasella, as John Foot has observed, is seen both as a ‘heroic act of war’ and ‘a pointless and vanguardist terrorist attack’. Bentivegna belonged to the Gruppi di Azione Patriottica, which was dominated by communists and socialists (he was a Trotskyite). Many thought ...”

“... Heaney, who were both a few years ahead of him at St Columb’s Catholic Grammar School (where John Hume and Brian Friel had also been pupils), he belonged to the first generation to have access to free secondary schooling after the war. He went to university at Queen’s in Belfast, spent time in London, and by the mid-1960s was back in Derry, fired up by ...”

“... concludes his introduction to All What Jazz (1970), a collection of mainly unimpressed reviews of John Coltrane, Miles Davis et al that initially appeared in the Telegraph. ‘Sometimes I imagine them,’ he muses of the readers of his monthly column,sullen fleshy inarticulate men, stockbrokers, sellers of goods, living in thirty-year-old detached houses ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... In the United States the provisions for ‘special education’ are very generous, partly because John Kennedy had a severely retarded sister. With special education in place, parents of autistic children fought long and hard for public awareness, and they got it. Today a child with learning and social problems will get more attention if he is labelled ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a Bothy Nicht at the Imperial Hotel in Aberdeen where he heard the ballad singing and stories of John Strachan, an Aberdeenshire farmer who became one of his most important sources. In ‘Journey to a Kingdom’, an unpublished poem written in 1938, Henderson leaves no doubt that these northern excursions were conscious acts of homecoming. In the summer of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”