“... the US still has troops stationed at al-Asad airbase north-west of Baghdad (once nicknamed ‘Camp Cupcake’ for its luxuries). In Saudi Arabia itself, the US operates a military training mission based in Eskan village. Only Iran, which broke away from the US system in 1979, houses no American military bases. An agreement​ signed by British ...”

“... is. He gets all the points, is extraordinarily sensitive to people.’ Mead and Fortune set up camp on the shore of Lake Chambri near Bateson’s field site, and began a four-month study of Tchambuli fishermen and traders. The Tchambuli had been driven from their homes by the Iatmul – the tribe that Bateson was studying – and had returned only in ...”

“... called Duberry Ramsay, a Crimean War veteran, who had been put in charge of a temporary prison camp at Morant Bay, where he had prisoners flogged and hanged at random. He was charged with the murder of one of them, but in spite of clear direction from an upright Scottish judge, Alan Ker, the grand jury of local property-owners would not indict him. This ...”

“... before, he decided to forget about his book and move on.When Wittgenstein got back from prison camp in Italy, he spent a year in Vienna training as a teacher, after which he worked with pre-adolescent children in a series of village schools in the Austrian Alps. His methods were in keeping with his approach to philosophy: he did not lay claim to any ...”

“... idea of literature, and a peculiar division of labour between writer and reader. Their author, William Gaddis, who won the National Book Award with JR, might actually have felt short-changed by the accolade of the imprint, to judge by a riff in JR deploring the way ‘longer works of fiction [are] now dismissed as classics and … largely unread due to the ...”

“... in some way untypical, and here the accounts we have are largely those of the better-off. Lord William Nevill, Lady Constance Lytton, Jabez Balfour and the suffragettes: their views reflect the redoubled degradation felt by prisoners drawn from a better social class. In other words, his overall picture does not compensate sufficiently for the fact that, as ...”

“... favourite English-language book). On the walls were photographs of Oscar Wilde, drawings by William Blake and examples of Walt Whitman’s early writings. Émigré writers and French intellectuals flocked there, and to the larger shop on rue de l’Odéon, where it moved in 1922. ‘From that moment on,’ Beach said, ‘for over twenty years, they ...”

“... ultimately more than eight hundred exiles, including most of the best brains in the evangelical camp. It was an exodus enthusiastically encouraged by the authorities, and in the early months of the regime Lord Chancellor Gardiner seems to have leaked advance warning of arrests, in the hope that the dissidents would take themselves off and save him the ...”

“... the present interest in neuroaesthetics. (The other, a 1999 paper by Vilayanur Ramachandran and William Hirstein entitled ‘The Science of Art’ and published in the Journal of Consciousness Studies, was a sparky jeu d’esprit; as Ramachandran later admitted, ‘We mainly did it for fun.’) Here was a clear-spoken, scrupulous expositor of science ...”

“... with his attack on Keats. Keats himself was enchanted by Hazlitt’s reply in the ‘Letter to William Gifford Esq.’ and copied pages of it in his journal-letter to his brother and sister-in-law in America, commenting on the ‘innate power with which it yeasts and words itself up – the feeling for the costume of society’. Gifford of course took the ...”

“... loveliest in England’. Eton College used to send its scouts to Tyneham for their annual summer camp. The Times photographed the harvest here in August 1929, and spread the Baldwinite result – a horse-drawn harvester set off against a silver sea – over half a page. Clough Williams-Ellis stretched Tyneham’s view of Worbarrow Bay over the end-papers of ...”

“... at the time, one can sometimes imagine him as a young Anglo-Saxon, rather like the narrator in William Gerhardie’s novel Futility, standing unobtrusively to the side of the action, a little in love with the lives he’s describing and at the same time worried about these people on whom so many difficulties have been inflicted, his grandmother ...”

“... in England, at least, tobacco addicts have a knack for smoking out the contradictions in the enemy camp. Smokers soon learn to distinguish the most prevalent form of anti-tabagisme, the ‘me-and-my-body’ school, from the campaigning kind, which is alert to a public-health issue. They also know when the first is masquerading as the second, which only ...”

“... others, as the passing of a more graceful age. Lee’s biographers used to fall into the second camp. Douglas Southall Freeman’s four-volume biography, published in 1934 and 1935, was the standard text for many decades. Freeman drove past Lee’s statue in Richmond every day on his way to work and saluted it. But more recent biographers, even those on the ...”

“... great, he was greatest in adversity’ – so thought Daniel O’Leary, his Irish aide-de-camp. He understood (or anyway learned) when boldness would pay off, or stand a good chance of paying off. In 1819, he decided to bypass the main concentration of Spanish strength in Venezuela and to liberate neighbouring, more lightly defended New Granada (the ...”