“... is deserved; those interested in the subject – nowadays it is hard to guess how many that would be – are almost bound to be intrigued by the book. When ‘putting down’ means trouncing or violently refuting, the book is safe, principally because one experiences no wish to do either ...”

“... in my experience, pays the mortgage and feeds young mouths more than writing novels does. But to be invited by a publisher to write one is, of course, immensely flattering. ‘I’d want a great deal of money,’ I said. ‘How much?’ she asked, her eyes beginning to focus. I named a preposterous figure. ‘That’s ...”

“... for two minutes. From the age of two she was brought up in New York in a series of rented rooms by her mother, Fran Liedloff, after Fran left Janet’s father, Henry Hobhouse, in England. (Bett, the character in The Furies based on Janet’s mother, commits the unforgivable sin of changing the baby’s diapers in the dining-room of her husband’s country ...”

“... have been ignorant, but the politicians were not. This Falklands retrospective was commissioned by BBC Radio, and the interviews it prints with many of the major participants on both sides contain much material that could not be broadcast, the first import of which is to recall how often the Falklands did intrude into the ...”

“... between these two leaks? In 1983, a young civil servant at the Ministry of Defence was so outraged by her Secretary of State’s plans to head off a demonstration against Cruise missiles that she copied the relevant document and delivered it in an anonymous envelope to the Guardian newspaper. In 1986, if Bernard Ingham’s book is to ...”

“... or at the very least, ‘interesting if controversial’, although, as I see it, justice could be done to them only by a writer like David Lodge or Malcolm Bradbury. It seems evident to me that their work is for the most part based on a very small element of truth whose significance is ...”

“... the Arab world and in Iran that US foreign policy towards the Middle Last is a conspiracy devised by the American Jewish lobby. It has long been accepted in Europe that the Arabs and Iranians, although prone to exaggeration, had a legitimate grievance about Washington’s automatic bias in favour of Israel since the departure of Eisenhower. The recent Middle ...”

“... is how that Anglocentrism, allegedly located in London and Oxbridge mostly, is supposed to be deeply satisfying to the English themselves. Robert Crawford, who pursues the argument on behalf of the Scots, avoids this mistake, detecting in a provincial Englishman like Tony Harrison a fury and resentment not surpassed ...”

“... in Shakespeare’s Henry VIII, he missed a First in Part II. This was a stroke of luck which, by ruling out a tutorship at Oxford, freed him to pursue his interests in military history as a lecturer at King’s College, London. His first book, a history of the Coldstream Guards written jointly with John Sparrow, was published in 1951. And there you have ...”

“... from where he enjoyed a decent view of the greyhound racing taking place in a park over the way. By then, despite his local upbringing, the dogs must have seemed otherworldly to him, enticingly alien. And as those nameless, sleek bodies scampered around the track – carrying with them the variously-priced hopes of those secular specks whooping and hollering ...”

“... Hebrew as a vernacular in the new Zionist settlements, itself preceded – and made possible – by the revival in Enlightenment Europe of Hebrew as a secular literary language. In each of these historical transitions, the language went through significant changes in vocabulary, grammar, syntax, verb-tenses and patterns of idiom. Because of the authority of ...”

“... of what happens in a football match today is our equivalent of yesterday’s battle; and it can be established later, as game, in the same heroic sequence. Who is taking care of the left flank? What is General Grouchy up to, and how soon can the Prussians be in action? At the height of his description of the Battle of ...”

“... cameraman’, but he points out that his first professional job in France was not till 1964 when, by sheer chance, he joined the unit shooting the six-part sketch film, Paris vu par ...The story illustrates once again that there are as many answers to the question ‘how did you get into films’ as there are people working in the movies. He didn’t think of ...”

“... behalf of Booker McConnell, announces in a press release that one of five named novelists ‘will be £10,000 richer at 7 p.m. on 23 October’. The other four will have to be content with leatherbound copies of their books; one of the ways in which this competition differs from a golf tournament is that nobody gets ...”

“... about the ‘ordeal’ of Mr Thorpe, in particular. That was a curiously well-chosen word. Trial by ordeal has a long history, even in England. And the judicial carnival which took place at the Old Bailey produced less certainty about who really did what to whom than if Jeremy Thorpe, George Deakin, David Holmes and John ...”