“... merged into a single script. Not surprisingly, two highly successful journalists, David Holden and Robert Lacey, decided to turn their talents to an exposition of this fascinating modern legend. Unfortunately Holden, a distinguished reporter with many years’ experience of the Middle East labyrinth, never lived to complete his book. He had written the first ...”

“... great resemblance between his own, open-ended journey and the intrusions of earlier strangers: of Robert Moffat, Livingstone and various envoys of the London Missionary Society, who thrived on scruples; of Cecil Rhodes, and an assortment of English and Boer traders, who did without them; of the Voortrekkers, who left the Cape in sombre spirits and travelled ...”

“... to infect them. Southall’s worries about the role of ships in transporting bedbugs persisted. Robert Usinger, the author of the monumental Monograph of Cimicidae (the family to which the bedbug belongs), saw a thriving colony of the tropical bedbug, Cimex hemipterus, on a liner sailing from Hong Kong to San Francisco. But local transport is just as much ...”

“... a man who lived down his earlier reputation as a radical to bring his biting sarcasm to the service of the Tories, always able to command an appreciative audience, albeit one with greater relish for his wit than respect for his political judgment. So much for John Vincent, the brilliant author of The Formation of the Liberal Party who became the ...”

“... Meanwhile, the women at home were freeing themselves from the worst tyrannies of domestic service, often earning high wages in the munitions factories, and finding some degree of the freedom that the men at the front had lost. The cultural anxieties provoked by the faltering definitions of gender pervade Barker’s novel. Aberrant groups are ...”

“... that he and Yealland are in the same business. Their function is to return men to the active service which has broken them. For all his sympathetic powers of observation and generous tolerance, Rivers cannot but act, in the end, as an instrument of control. Whether it is right for him to acquiesce in this process is something which he comes increasingly ...”

“... One of the remarkable things about this case was the sentences handed down by Chief Justice Robert Lowry. While McCaughey and Weir were given life sentences, the other policemen involved in the bar bombing were let off with suspended sentences. McCaughey’s father, who aided his son in concealing the priest on his farm, was also released with a ...”

“... first few years of their existence is integral to this strategy. People must be lured into using a service and then kept using it by whatever means necessary; only later is this power converted into revenue. To suggest that a Facebook user consents to all the ways Facebook uses or might use their data is completely to misrepresent the logic at work here. For ...”

“... in one of the last coach and horse mail vans: in 1904 the first combustion engine motor-car service was introduced by the New Zealand Postal Service. For more than twenty-five years, the fate of the Lake Taupo was unclear. Then, in 1930, Jack Dennet, a farmer and amateur philatelist in Lincolnshire, discovered it in ...”

“... the Great War (2012), a superb study by Thomas Dilworth, we learn that Jones had seen more active service than any other war writer including Edmund Blunden, who’s normally credited with this debilitating honour. ‘Even with the time subtracted for convalescence and leave, he spent a total of 117 weeks at the front, which is at least two months longer than ...”

“... object, as some will, to foxes being killed in their gardens. For those uncertain what a coffee service looks like, there is a drawing of one. Marginally more useful, perhaps, is the page of diagrams showing how and how not to eat peas. Quite a few of us will be unfamiliar with the use of loving-cups and rose bowls, or with the technique of taking snuff ...”

“... How do we want our judges to make their decisions? Robert Jenrick, shadow justice minister for the Tories until his defection to Reform in January, told the Conservative Party Conference last year that ‘judges who blur the line between adjudication and activism can have no place in our justice system.’ Judicial activism is a habitual complaint of those on the right when legal decisions don’t go their way ...”

“... faulty passages, but I know of no poet in any language who has written so much that is good,’ Robert Southey wrote (the declaration is emblazoned on the dust-jacket of Juliet Barker’s new Life). Yet any sense of this – of the subtle, elementary qualities of Wordsworth’s verse – is rarely apparent to those who study him, and rarely apparent in the ...”

“... Robert Vitalis​ tells a great story about how he came to write this book. Some years ago, sitting in the Clark University library avoiding grading his students’ final exams, he pulled an old history of the university off the shelf. Clark played a key role in the birth of the field of international relations in the two decades before the First World War, he read, especially by founding and supporting one of the new discipline’s flagship journals, the Journal of Race Development ...”

“... in Bevan’s home town, Tredegar; he was a small boy when Bevan was founding the National Health Service, was raised in one of the prefabricated bungalows built by Bevan when Minister of Housing; a teenager during the Bevanite wrangles of the Fifties, he was taken by his father to hear Bevan speak; he read In Place of Fear soon after it came out (and ...”