“... of the world’s modern wars’ nor a ‘warfare of terror’, as others have claimed. Lincoln may have sanctioned a ‘policy of “being terrible” on the enemy’, but no such policy was put into force. ‘How destructive,’ Neely asks rhetorically, did ‘the protagonists in the Civil War want to be or dare to be, under the assumptions of that ...”

“... policy is a particularly anguished subject. While the peace with Israel reached in 1979 by Sadat may make Egypt a ‘moderate’ state in the eyes of Washington, it has left many Egyptians deeply embittered. Mubarak drew a lesson from Sadat’s fate: it was one thing to make a deal with Israel – quite another to make nice. He would honour the peace ...”

“... dabs of kerosene light and the occasional brace of headlights showed a city was there at all. Robert, an Armenian PE teacher who had befriended me in the coupé, took me through the frosty murk of Yerevan’s central station and into a doorway. In an instant there was light, power, a swift transaction involving tokens, a set of escalators, and at their ...”

“... asking a question, or giving an order, or making a correction overlooked in recent conversation, may do so, and the charge is twopence halfpenny.’ The directors of the London Telephone Company were hoping to provide a similar service. The term ‘kiosk’ drew at once on a faint association with the Turkish pavilion or summerhouse, and more palpably on the ...”

“... Few people’s reputations have been improved by the credit crisis. One is the BBC’s Robert Peston; another is Vince Cable. A third is Gillian Tett, capital markets editor of the Financial Times. Prior to the crisis, she and her team were the only mainstream journalists who covered in any detail the arcane world of ‘credit derivatives ...”

“... associated with aquatic animals come with a chill.) ‘To the extent that culture and language may actually affect perception, thought and cognition,’ Horacio Fabrega and Stephen Tyma wrote in 1976, ‘then to that extent they may also affect the actual experience of pain.’ In the West, when the humoral theory of ...”

“... Le Roy Ladurie, whose Times of Feast, Times of Famine was published in 1971. A decade later, Robert Rotberg and Theodore Rabb published a trailblazing volume of essays, Climate and History, their mission to explore ‘an exciting frontier for reading and research’. Recently, the geologist Gifford Miller and his team at the University of ...”

“... Rebellion of 1641 between them dominate the proximate causation of the English Civil War, and that Robert Burns mattered perhaps more than Cobbett and certainly more than Blake to the Northern English working class of the mid-19th century. But their work takes it for granted that English history is in effect self-contained: the American experiences of Paine ...”

“... do so, under the pressure of events, after four students were shot dead at Kent State in Ohio on 4 May 1970. She would appear anywhere she was asked, no matter how small; she stuffed envelopes, manned phone banks, moved to grey Detroit when that was what it took to get the 1971 ‘Winter Soldier’ hearings off the ground, in which a procession of veterans ...”

“... broached brandy bottle is characteristic of Hughes’s practical canniness. Two months later (22 May 1956) he is telling Olwyn:I have met a first-rate American poetess. She really is good. Certainly one of the best female poets I ever read, and a damn sight better than the run of good male. Her main enthusiasm at present is me, and she thinks my verses are ...”

“... The prodigiously gifted artist and writer Joe Brainard died of Aids in a hospital in New York in May 1994, at the age of 52. He had long been revered in certain parts of the New York art and poetry worlds, though he never achieved, or, by all accounts, desired, the celebrity and status of Andy Warhol or Claes Oldenburg or Jim Dine, alongside whose work his elegant collages were first presented to British gallery-goers at the Hayward’s Pop Art show of 1969 ...”

“... You may well, at some point, have known a girl like Cora: big, loud, gregarious, ‘full-on all over’; talented in smoke-rings, hand-jiving, arm-wrestling, withering looks; the one who always seems to know about make-up, pop stars, sex and contraception; with ‘a laugh like a sewer when the notion took her and no time to lose ...”

“... out on – is the principal theme of the next two instalments, Falling towards England (1985) and May Week Was in June (1990). Written as his TV fame reached its peak, these books – scrappier than the first, and more ingratiatingly flip – get less enjoyable as qualities he’s prouder of start falling into place. Part of the problem with instalments two ...”

“... Stones particularly did release chicks from the fact of “I’m just a little chick.”’ This may be one of those places where Fox needed to do a touch more editorial work, just for coherence, not in any way to prevent the authentic voice of Keith Richards on the subject of feminism from being heard. You do get the feeling that Keith can take or leave ...”

“... leader’, sending him to entertain the children of visitors at one of the city hospitals. ‘That may have been the birth of the silent piece,’ Cage said in an interview in 1982: he wasn’t allowed to make any noise for fear of disturbing the patients, so invented counting games that involved moving rhythmically round the space, in silence. In San ...”