“... This is a country where convicted murderers, even multiple murderers like Barend Strydom and Robert McBride, are released within a year or two to walk the streets and give TV interviews justifying their savagery. Strydom, who gunned down 11 hapless black passers-by because he didn’t like blacks, advises us that he dislikes English-speakers just as much ...”

“... in a few days’ time. Only at that stage did it emerge that Ms Roberts was so full of naive self-belief that she really did think she would win, and wouldn’t hear a word more of this defeatist talk. She lost by 13,600. The second point is far more significant. Young notes that Mrs Thatcher has developed a close relationship with the large Jewish ...”

“... him to admire it, and Mr Coningham on his left entreating him to despise it, must end, in mere self-defence, in shaking both the critical gentlemen off, and judging for himself, not of the Bellini only, but of every other picture in the collection as well.’ There is a deliberate confusion between the assessment of the condition and authorship of a ...”

“... to the ‘lineage history’ (vamshvāli) which is a strong tradition among Keralan Christians. In Robert Eric Frykenberg’s Christianity in India, vamshvālis are described as orally transmitted pedigrees which ‘claim hereditary authority within certain elite families, through which kattanars [pastors] and metrans [bishops] descended from one generation to ...”

“... getting dressed next door to Nijinsky at a club swimming-pool in Bar Harbor, the set-designer Robert Edmond Jones was surprised by a knock at the door: I open it. A middle-aged man stands there, exquisitely dressed in fastidious nuances of pearl grey which harmonise with the tones of his silvery, scented moustache. He is tall and willowy and his delicate ...”

“... touch them not.Like Keats when enraptured, Owen at his most fervent moves beyond inhibition and self-consciousness, here boldly evoking both Christ’s Noli me tangere and his crucifixion. Such analogies were commonplace in the iconography of pro-war propaganda, and on occasion, as in ‘Le Christianisme’, were ridiculed by Owen himself, but here they ...”

“... Labour paper should not succeed, as the Herald did under the inspiring editorship of Robert Blatchford and George Lansbury – provided only that the Labour movement is sufficiently enlightened to set up a newspaper trust which would guarantee its editors as much freedom as that enjoyed by the editor of the Economist, say, or the Guardian or, in ...”

“... which are unable to address the original chaos he delights in. In the same way he tells Plath that Robert Graves has ‘a kind of disinfected enunciation, a crumb accent no less, states everything so far under that nothing at all is heard’.In these letters his love for Plath, for her ‘ponky warmth’, is absolute; in one letter he moves from describing a ...”

“... case, between husband and wife.Lucie Nicolas (my grandmother kept her maiden name) was self-employed and independent. She would have been happy to be called petite bourgeoise – unlike her husband, who was resolutely classe ouvrière and had no truck with the hearth-crossing relationship with factory owners. When they dropped by with cloth ...”

“... military intervention cynically derided as Libya’s clients doing their duty to their patron, a self-serving judgment that was unfair to South Africa in particular. That the Arab League, whose support for a no-fly zone was invoked by London, Paris and Washington to claim Arab legitimation of Nato’s intervention, had a membership almost entirely confined ...”

“... as Soviet citizens and custodians of their cultures, which retained the right to outright self-determination. Phinney acknowledged the necessity of the developmentalism imposed by the US state but pointed out that it was hardly in Indian interests to become proletarians at the same level as the poorest people in the country. ‘The US ...”

“... with good grace but it’s hard when it was brought about by a campaign eloquently described by Robert Harris as ‘the most depressing, divisive, duplicitous political event of my lifetime’: words which, incidentally, were written before the announcement of the murder of Jo Cox, the defacement of London’s Polish Social and Cultural Association, and the ...”

“... to the parallel cult of ‘pristine’ wilderness. Devotees of both practise a highly selective, self-induced blindness, cancelling from their view, and all claims to their sympathy, everything that intrudes on their preconceived pictures of how landscape ought to be. This sort of mental bulldozing tends to bring real bulldozing in its wake, in fits of ...”

“... the Observer hired him to report on politics in Western Europe (driving a Bentley with his friend Robert Blake) and then in Czechoslovakia (a Lagonda with the young Alan Clark). In Tuscany, on the first of these jaunts, he met Bernard Berenson, art collector and maestro of highly paid authentication. Berenson became an intimate friend, and their ...”

“... form of curatorial management, organising chunks of text on a screen. The discerning scholarly self on which the humanities depend was conceived as the product of transitions between spaces – library, lecture hall, seminar room, study – linked together by work with pen and paper. When all this is replaced by the interface with screen and keyboard, and ...”