“... requirement in doubt. Mount’s account of the framework of the United Kingdom, and what repair it may call for, has already beguiled readers across the political spectrum. Commentators on right and left alike have praised its wit and acumen. If few have seen eye to eye with every proposal it makes, virtually all have agreed that this is the work of an ...”

“... On 23 May 1949, Lionel Gamlin, producer of the Light Programme’s Hello Children, wrote to Enid Blyton to ask whether she would be willing to be interviewed about the best holiday she could remember. ‘Dear Mr Gamlin,’ Blyton wrote the next day. ‘Thank you for your nice letter. It all sounds very interesting but I ought to warn you of something you obviously don’t know, but which has been well known in the literary and publishing world for some time – I and my stories are completely banned by the BBC as far as children are concerned ...”

“... ideals of the Republic. Goldgar rightly argues that the historian reconstructing an organisation may find its malfunctions more informative, in crucial respects, than its blueprints. But Goldgar also argues that many debates proved impossible to resolve. Even within the world Of the Huguenots, disagreement raged – for example, on whether local churches had ...”

“... of the non-combatant Lawrence to complain while thousands of his compatriots fell in France. But Richard Aldington felt that Lawrence never recovered from the banning of The Rainbow, and Kinkead-Weekes follows him by placing this event at the centre of his narrative. The judge ruled that there was ‘no justification whatever for the perpetration of such a ...”

“... stepping into the fray as Docs’ Joshua, sums up the feeling best when he says here: ‘Hunter may be the reincarnation of Lono – the God returned after 1500 years of wandering like a lovesick child to save his people – and his beloved American Constitution ... He is your saviour and he is guardian of all you profess to hold dear. In his weirdness he ...”

“... could be the difference between being a statistic in a Channel 4 filler and being reincarnated by Richard Burton. Only losers leave their stories to the East London Advertiser and the more literate class of probation officer. Take that McVicar. He was totally out of order. An armed robber, ‘one of the top men of his profession’ (Lambrianou), he blew all ...”

“... to live with her brother, Leo. Like Barney, she already knew she was gay: an early romance with May Bookstaver, ‘upright and a trifle brutal’, had convinced her of that. In France Stein began work on QED, a novel about Bookstaver, and she and Leo started buying up paintings – Cézanne, Renoir, Picasso, Matisse. ‘Cézanne gave me a new feeling about ...”

“... shameful tale has been too often and too loudly told in recent times to need reiterating here. It may be that we have learned something from the error of our ways. We have faced up to our post-crash debts and are repaying them as best we can; our role in United Nations peacekeeping campaigns is too seldom remarked but is a matter for justified pride; and the ...”

“... In​ August and September 1990, Richard Sale, a lieutenant colonel from the Light Infantry regiment of the British army, toured the UK and West Germany – then just months away from reunification – with a primitive Zenith Supersport laptop. Sale had commanded a company, some 120 men, in Northern Ireland in the early 1980s and later a battalion of 650 ...”

“... brother James had been on Captain Cook’s second voyage). There is Joshua Reynolds and Richard Sheridan, and later Madame de Staël and Talleyrand. In her ostensibly private records of her life, Burney often keeps pace with current events and personalities, providing the biographer with the background as well as the foreground of a Life. It is as ...”

“... Kennan’s modest agenda for thawing relations with Belgrade. Kennan left government for good in May 1963. Yugoslavia’s estrangement from Moscow, unrest in Poland, rebellion in Hungary, Khrushchev’s destalinisation campaign and the Sino-Soviet split made it apparent that the notion of a monolithic communist threat was no longer justified by the ...”

“... dictates of politicians and to the delusions of popular culture? No one could be sure. In 1964, Richard Hofstadter brilliantly described the ‘paranoid style’ of American politics: your opponents weren’t simply wrong, they were conspiring against you, mobilising dark forces to suppress free and rational thought. The joining up of psychiatry and history ...”

“... on which African Americans stood. ‘White people had Judy Garland. We had Nina,’ the comedian Richard Pryor said. Simone’s voice answered the radical call for a profound articulation of the Black Tradition and incidentally made her ‘the patron saint of rebellion’, according to Crouch. Her singing, an African-American critic wrote in the Philadelphia ...”

“... between 1990 and 2009 found that 90.5 per cent of them were Deobandis. The would-be shoe bomber Richard Reid had Deobandi connections, as did the 2006 transatlantic airline bomb plotters and two of the 7/7 attackers. As Deobandis sometimes rather wearily point out, these concerns are not new. In 1875, less than ten years after the movement was founded, Sir ...”

“... into a more critical perspective on the war. Eventually even the cautious Times came around and in May 1972 put Hersh on their payroll. This was the beginning of a pattern that would be repeated over several decades: powerful editors – first Rosenthal, later David Remnick of the New Yorker – supported Hersh, for a time, even while they did not always share ...”