“... and indiscriminately directed against civilians’. Indeed, ‘even where rebels may have been present in villages, the impact of attacks on civilians shows that the use of military force was manifestly disproportionate to any threat posed by the rebels.’ These acts, the commission concluded, ‘were conducted on a widespread and systematic ...”

“... Raban attempts to probe beneath the rhetoric to the actual experience of these emigrants. Robert Louis Stevenson’s caustic characterisations of his fellow passengers in his marvellous The Amateur Emigrant are delightedly and extensively quoted as evidence of the real motivations behind the movement westwards: ‘We were a company of the ...”

“... Confederate widow has lived for more than ninety years. A first-person narrator – ‘My English may be ugly as a mud fence but I know what a story is,’ she boasts – Lucy Marsden tells her story, and many other people’s stories, to an anonymous listener equipped with a tape-recorder. The garrulous old lady’s Carolina brogue is not wholly ...”

“... would happen to them if they did not go to war. Where, though, did responsibility lie? Partly, Robert Evans explains, with Austro-Hungary – but only partly, because the war its leaders wanted under Serbian provocation was only a small localised conflict, a third Balkan war. The main responsibility lay with the German leaders, who alone wanted a major war ...”

“... present lexicographer, so it can acquire new writers, compilers, continuers.’ In a US review, Robert Coover suggested that computer hackers might make Dictionary of the Khazars their own as a prototype hypertext, unpaginated, non-sequential, that can be entered anywhere by anybody. This looks forward to a utopian, high-tech version of the oral tradition ...”

“... belatedly proclaimed, of the European past. This last point, on which Douglas strongly insists, may provoke some opposition. For example, she says more than once that Hemingway proved to be a better writer about the war than Robert Graves or Siegfried Sassoon, even though they saw a lot more fighting than he ...”

“... then they will repeat exactly the condescending errors that cost them the Congress last fall and may lose them the White House next year.So the language of therapy and recovery is kicking in, if anything so bland and superficial can be said to have any kick at all. The words ‘fascist’ and ‘racist’ are never employed – perhaps from some exaggerated ...”

“... with gold and silver crosses, by soldiers of a British expeditionary force in 1868, after Sir Robert Napier’s defeat of King Tewodros, who had spent many years collecting them. They are now in the possession of the British Library and the Queen, among others, and there are no plans to return them. Lalibela was named after a man born in the 12th century ...”

“... Or Debbie Ladley. She was 18, a nanny, and she had given some help to LAND. James Cutler and Robert Edwards record: ‘On 29 September 1986, she was hanging out her washing in her garden at Stragglethorpe near Fulbeck. A man grabbed her from behind by the throat and banged her head against the wall. She suffered a fractured wrist, a cracked rib and ...”

“... the most haunting stories in the book is that of the Tierra del Fuegian boy kidnapped by Captain Robert Fitzroy, Chief Officer of HMS Beagle, in 1830. The boy was given a name by the crew – Jemmy Button – and taken to London, where he ‘saw a stone lion on the steps of Northumberland House, and settled down to a boarding-school at Walthamstow’. On the ...”

“... or dangerous. And always it made its mark, left some inexplicable compulsion behind. As Robert Wohl points out in his conclusion to The Lost Voices, Hitler was a veteran of the trenches, and he found his own way of exorcising and transforming the experience. ‘A war has no end for those who fought it,’ said Curzio Malaparte, who grew up admiring ...”

“... coulisses of Argentine politics, and can fairly be called a participant as well as a commentator. Robert Cox of the Buenos Aires Herald, who writes with the authority of a fellow editor whose support for Timerman never wavered, says that ‘La Opinion gave lukewarm support for human rights and ... maintained weathervane policies according to the views of ...”

“... that Edward cannot love ... he cannot respond to my love ... I have prayed that I and my baby may die, but we shall not, though this would free [him]. I am as strong as ever. I pile work on work till my body can scarce move for weariness, but nothing lifts the darkness from my soul. By 1911 the dangerous game that Thomas played with Helen had produced ...”

“... lucid patience and justice, has done nothing better. To bring out three books on the same day, as Robert Lowell knew when he promulgated History, For Lizzie and Harriet and The Dolphin, is to ask for comparisons, indeed to cry out for them when some of the work is old, some new – and the more so when, as in Hinde’s case, each book costs the same to the ...”

“... no less to interviewers and critics, even in writing (notably to Edmund Wilson). In fact, Malraux may scarcely have set foot on the Chinese mainland when he wrote The Conquerors. Yet the book convinced no less a reader than Leon Trotsky that it was based on first-hand experience. It even convinced an old China hand like Jean Fontenoy, editor of Le Journal de ...”