“... Protestant people, to use their weapons if Britain tried to force constitutional change on them. David Trimble, leader of the Ulster Unionist Party, now hailed in many quarters as a ‘moderate’, was himself a supporter of Vanguard, the militant Unionist body which in the early Seventies had links with Loyalist paramilitaries. After the abolition of the ...”

“... what Sharett called ‘his old dream’ of reshaping Lebanon. Now he had the assistance of his young chief of staff Moshe Dayan. According to Sharett’s report of a meeting in May 1955, Dayan felt that the trick was to find a suitable Lebanese officer – a captain would suffice. We should win his heart or buy him, to get him to agree to declare himself ...”

“... controls, withdrawal from the EEC and import controls. Much of this wasn’t new. The historian David Edgerton has described the AES as a ‘modernising, techno-nationalist, productionist, autarchic programme’ that was basically complementary to Harold Wilson’s ‘White Heat’ agenda. It was, however, profoundly out of step with the European Community ...”

“... of opportunity are based.But what is a ‘genuine sense’ of meritocracy? When, in 1958, Michael Young put the term into general circulation with the publication of The Rise of the Meritocracy (he did not, as is often assumed, coin the term), the suffix pointed to an analogy with democracy or aristocracy as forms of rule or government. It suggested that ...”

“... they polished the wooden cabinets that housed the machines. The strike began after three of the 15 young women in this department were moved elsewhere and the remaining 12 told to do the same amount of work for a weekly wage of 12 shillings: a pay cut of two shillings. They walked out, followed by two thousand other women workers, and soon afterwards by the ...”

“... the crew, weighing his options with Hamlet-like indecisiveness, is Ishmael, a ‘completely modern young intellectual’ who is left isolated from the masses, unable to ‘embrace reality spontaneously’. (‘No intellectuals in the world run so much after the psychic realities of their own souls as Americans,’ James wrote witheringly in American ...”

“... phrase, and – despite his belief that the press should be rigidly controlled in wartime – the young major who was always good for a quote was popular with newsmen, 29 of whom later joined in public praise of his handling of the Washington press. Only America’s entry into the war ended this ground-breaking assignment. MacArthur had learnt a ...”

“... in what a standard account calls one of the most romantic episodes in the history of medicine, the young man was taken from the woods to New York, where for decades his doctor could watch exactly what went on in his stomach when he ate. Some of this is real ‘north face of the Eiger’ stuff. Jesse Lazear let a mosquito bite a yellow-fever victim and then ...”

“... is right to be aggrieved at Nato expansion. Talking points from Kissinger, John Mearsheimer, David Harvey, Bernie Sanders, Jack F. Matlock Jr et al are cited everywhere, along with Russian disinformation (the Russian TV station RT has a huge following on Weibo). Ukraine is often described as a failed state, its only hope of survival to accept its role as ...”

“... only TNT,’ Leijten said. ‘The postal system is sick.’ On the eve of my journey to Holland, David Simpson, the earnest Ulsterman who is Royal Mail’s chief spokesman, took me to one of the facilities the company is most proud of, the Gatwick mail centre in Sussex. Despite its name, it has nothing to do with the nearby airport. It’s a giant mail ...”

“... onto something that has paucity at the heart of it,’ Saunders says in a conversation with David Sedaris included at the end of Tenth of December.Why is his work – winner of the Booker Prize, lauded in every conceivable quarter – still attended by the scent of failure? It must be, in order that he can overcome. At some point, the source of ...”

“... letters, packed with insight and wonderful phrases, are quoted in Brett Millier’s biography, in David Kalstone’s Becoming a Poet and in Lorrie Goldensohn’s Elizabeth Bishop: The Biography of a Poetry. ‘What one seems to want in art, in experiencing it, is the same thing that is necessary for its creation, a self-forgetful, perfectly useless ...”

“... was the cinema.’ In Sélection officielle, Frémaux remembers suiting up (as is obligatory) as a young man to sit in the worst section of the 2300-seat palais, with the ‘lumpenproletariat of film lovers’. Frémaux may not be a technocrat, but when I asked fellow film critics at Cannes how they would describe him, the most common responses were ...”

“... of Roy Lichtenstein at Condon Riley in June, still safely Ab Ex. But something was happening. A young man called Frank Stella had a painting in a group show at Tibor de Nagy, made up of ranks of identical black stripes: ‘Like the doors of a big clothes-press,’ as one reviewer put it. It was a dense moment, a discontented moment. Lots of people, not just ...”

“... can easily be changed and, in effect, redesigned. In Tal’s own words, the machine ‘is always young, like Dorian Gray’. In the Six-Day and Yom Kippur Wars Israeli air power and tank power were combined strategically with shattering effect on the Egyptian Forces, and tank officers were able to act with a surprising degree of local initiative. The Israeli ...”