“... depth in English political fictions, when these are compared with works of European origin, may be due to the fact that the English simply lack any experience of the totalitarian state: ‘The special world created by secret-police forces, censorship of opinion, torture and frame-up trials is, of course, known about and ...”

“... fields of established research in an undrained bog of questions. Some ambitious channels were dug by Victorians, with generally Unionist teleologies. But in the first part of the 20th century those channels seemed to silt up again until Marinell Ash published her poignant appeal The Strange Death of Scottish History in 1980. ...”

“... By my count, though I may have missed a few, this is the 25th volume of Ezra Pound’s highly distinctive correspondence to see the light of day. The first selection of his letters, edited by D.D. Paige and culled from the years 1907-41, was published in 1950, when Pound was four years into what would be a 12-year sojourn in St Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, to which he’d been confined indefinitely after pleading insanity at his trial for treason in 1946 ...”

“... now 45-year-old occupation. The story of Israeli policy in the late 1960s has been told before, by Tom Segev and Gershom Gorenberg among others. But no one has provided as thorough – or as damning – an account as Avi Raz, a former reporter for Ma’ariv who has read every pertinent document in every available archive, in Hebrew, Arabic and English. The ...”

“... We were appointed to the Commission on a Bill of Rights in March 2011 by Nick Clegg. The circumstances were not auspicious, and we were concerned from the outset that our composition – all white, almost all male, almost all lawyers and London-based – would undermine our ability to speak with any legitimacy. The Conservatives had come into government committed to tearing up the Human Rights Act, an early product of the previous Labour government seen by many of the new government’s Tory supporters (and some in the media) as little more than a charter for foreign terrorists and local criminals ...”

“... poets’ have ‘the persistence to wrestle with their strong precursors, even to the death’. By doing so they manifest and struggle to overcome the anxiety of influence: ‘each poet’s fear that no proper work remains for him to perform’. The Anxiety of Influence set out a range of psychic and rhetorical defence mechanisms for overcoming that anxiety ...”

“... well finish up a few fields from the end of the runway’. At the time he was looked at askance by many social democrats within the Labour Party (people like me, as I readily admit) for supposing that there would be so much as a runway. Within a year, however, we had all strapped our safety belts, magnificently unprepared ...”

“... stay in London thirty years ago, there is an interesting exchange with the psychiatrist David Cooper. Sinclair: It seems to me that what has emerged from this Congress [the Dialectics of Liberation] is the necessity for what has been described as madness – as one of the few active means of keeping society alive ... Cooper: Yes, I think we’ve ...”

“... to trial, the impetus soon weakened and in the place of justice came punishment by the Commandos, who sought out and murdered leaders of the Young Turks in Germany in 1921-22. The aim of the Commandos – and this was Caesese’s point – was not primarily revenge. Their most famous member, Soghomon Tehlirian, surrendered voluntarily to the ...”

“... paths divided. There was no percentage in Bill’s advisers bullet-pointing paperbacks composed by a peripatetic, a white man who wrote in black-face. Griffin does not aspire to Easy’s confidential charm, his bright-eyed savvy, his innocence. He’s a white man’s black, darker in spirit, thwarted and confused. And New Orleans, the setting for Sallis’s ...”

“... of the Roman Empire has himself become the object of serious historical study. It can still be maintained that his work is, in D.R. Woolf’s words, ‘probably the most famous and perhaps the most misunderstood history written in the past three centuries’, and that this is the consequence of an excessive focus on the Decline and Fall’s first ...”

“... where he had been put in the Châtelet prison and then, to his outrage, exiled to Ile de France by order of the Naval Minister. What he was supposed to have done to warrant this treatment is far from clear. The correspondence from Paris to the island administrators simply stated that he was a ‘dangerous’ man who had made a number of unfounded and ...”

“... of the general election of 1945 and sensing the surprise at the size of Attlee’s majority shared by Conservative and Labour supporters alike. And I remember the comment then made by one of my relations to the effect that the problems facing the country in the aftermath of the Second World War were such that no government ...”

“... the final withdrawal of US troops, but its spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh declared that they should be gone by 2010; this fitted Obama’s promise to withdraw ‘one to two’ combat brigades a month for 16 months. Suddenly, John McCain’s belief that US troops should stay until some undefined victory looked impractical and ...”

“... Christian values in highbrow journalism and popular fiction – even when they were racked by religious doubt. The ruling class ruled because it was clever, because it was well off, and because it hung together. It wore the old school tie, congregated in the Home Counties, kept skeletons in the cupboard and marriage in the family. It covered up Anthony ...”