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“... forgot to spend them, until the cheques grew tattered and the notes got lost; eventually his wife took over the household finances and restricted him to pocket money of 2/6 per outing. Sex was not an obvious temptation either. Despite the restrictions she put on his wallet and on his waistline, G.K. adored his sober, dutiful, unshowy Frances, and was content ...”

“... of near misses, such as when Louis, the French Dauphin, was offered the English throne after King John’s death and was cheered through the streets of London before being defeated in the Battle of Lincoln in May 1217 and then the Battle of Sandwich in August, perhaps the first ever battle fought by sailing ships in the open sea.Even the fiasco of the last ...”

“... The conquest​ of most of the North American continent by Anglophone settlers took roughly three hundred years, from the first stake at Jamestown to the last bullet at Wounded Knee. The Spanish had subdued a much vaster population of Indigenous peoples in Mexico and Peru in just under half a century and expected to repeat the formula, mobilising the Indigenous tributaries against the Indigenous core as they moved up from their outposts in Florida, only to find there was no power centre to replace ...”

“... round number pulled out of a hat. In the New York Times the PR spokesman identified himself as ‘John Barron’. In the Associated Press story the same publicity man called himself ‘Donald Baron’ and was quoted as saying that ‘the merit of these stones was not great enough to save them.’ Both ‘John’ and ...”

“... facilely grouped as a cetacean school of Great White Males (Styron, Norman Mailer, James Jones, John Updike, Saul Bellow, Gore Vidal, J.D. Salinger, Joseph Heller, the recently retired Philip Roth), whose ghostly father and bearded Neptune disturbing the liquor cabinet deep into the night was Ernest Hemingway. Even those least influenced by Hemingway’s ...”

“... an ‘example of unfair burden sharing’ and ‘using a hatchet when you need a scalpel’ when John McCain proposed it during the campaign of 2008. In the same speech, Obama embraced the false analogy between federal budgets and household budgets, overlooking (for starters) the government’s control of taxation and the money supply. ‘Families across the ...”

“... for them with schools. It does not fully deal with the cultural claims of the myth. Children took two years or more to learn to read and would come to writing skill only as a subsequent supplement. The Kirk urged parents to put their children to school to learn to read: it did not expect more. Prestige certainly attached to writing skill, if it could be ...”

“... He was definitively despatched by Gore Vidal some long while ago. Conor Cruise O’Brien then took his furious turn at the coconut shy. And here is Hitchens, lobbing adjectives like grenades in the same cause. It’s all too much. One can’t easily imagine anyone wasting so much ink and anger over, say, Bernard Levin – Britain’s answer to ...”

“... there were more police up from Scotland Yard to see her: Detective Inspector Moffatt, for one, who took her to the Police Training College for an interview which lasted most of the day. She told Mr Moffatt that she was a member of the IRA, and used to carry guns from Dublin to Belfast. She said she had taken explosives up from London to Manchester for the M62 ...”

“... that duty in drastically different ways. Alexis’s intellectual path was strikingly his own. It took him some time to find it. Family connections secured him an (unpaid) post of juge auditeur – a junior magistrate – at Versailles, but he had no particular aptitude for the work, and had not attained a salaried position by the time he left for good in ...”

“... Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington, author of After Reason and The Female Woman, took up the task of writing about Picasso because she had been ‘seduced by his magnetism, his intensity, that mysterious quality of inexhaustibility bursting forth from the transfixing stare of his black marble eyes as much as from his work’, but had come to be ‘chilled’ by him ...”

“... Convention was a glamorous performance. But at one point, trying to reproach the Democrats with John Adams’s phrase ‘Facts are stubborn things,’ he slipped and declared instead: ‘Facts are stupid things.’ At the moment he wished to invoke an intransigent, incontrovertible reality which would supposedly confound his enemies and bear out the ...”

“... style’, and whole new lines of children’s toys appeared glor-ifying the Boers and ridiculing John Bull. Even the pacifist Tolstoy was caught up in the wild enthusiasm for the war: ‘You know what point I’ve reached? Opening a paper every morning I passionately wish to read that the Boers have beaten the British.’ He knew that he ‘should not ...”

“... were Angles, or other Germanic peoples, and they created a chaotic patchwork of statelets which took half a millennium to evolve into larger political and cultural units. This did not have to happen. It wasn’t inevitable. But about two hundred years later, after countless battles, marriages, mergers and chance occurrences, a dozen rival kingdoms ...”

“... The modern scholarly literature on the history of witch beliefs and witch trials, however, first took shape in opposition to Margaret Murray’s The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (1921), which claimed that Renaissance witches were worshippers of pagan gods. It has therefore been resolutely agnostic about the existence of actual witches in the period of the ...”