“... is unlikely that Blair got his taste for military action from that source. But Thomson’s example may account for another leitmotif of Blair’s personal philosophy and of this memoir: his obsession with what he calls ‘grip’. Faced with a challenge, Blair believes you have to do two things: first, you think it through; then you grip it. Merely ...”

“... Some sixty years ago, when David Thomson was a boy, he suffered from a condition that badly affected his eyesight. He could see, but poorly. He read Braille and, though this was forbidden, the printed page. On two occasions, when the condition grew worse, he was condemned to spend six weeks at a time lying on his back in a darkened room ...”

“... clear that he wanted the job less than his mother wanted it for him; and in that, at least, he may have shown good judgment. Like so many royal biographies, this book is devoid of any real historical perspective. It is excessively informative and inadequately interpretative, and is written in the sort of coy and courtly language which the events of 1992 ...”

“... universal humanity of the American ideal. There was anobility about this ideal, however naive it may sound to Europeans, and one strand of American isolationism has always related to it. Nevertheless, the intermingling of this tradition with a naive belief in the Utopian nature of Stalinist Russia produced a great deal of double think and double-talk. It is ...”

“... pronunciation or his mannerism would be cads, and they knew it.’Bottomley’s career ended in May 1922, with his prosecution for fraud. Key to his defeat was the defection of a group of admirers and associates, chief among them Reuben Bigland, a Birmingham printer. One difference between the two men was that Bottomley had escaped poverty by his late ...”

“... Eugène Sigismondovitch Politovsky, author of From Libau to Tsushima, published after his death in May 1905. Dredging Politovsky up from history for a commission he received from the Ferens Art Gallery in Hull in 1983, Douglas Dunn has made him the narrator of his book-length poem The Donkey’s Ears. It’s been a long journey for Politovsky this time round ...”

“... in a way they would not have if the perpetrators had been, say, Russian soldiers. While there may be some truth in this, it was the allegation that sexual violence was systematically used as a ‘weapon of war’ by Hamas that played a key role in flipping the duty of denial. The extent of the sexual crimes committed on 7 October remains unclear, as does ...”

“... of the foundations for the Wars of the Roses. These views have not gone unchallenged. In the 1950s May McKisack wrote a sturdy defence of Edward (rightly praised by Mortimer). Then, in the 1980s and 1990s, in a series of books and articles based on extensive work in the record sources, Mark Ormrod argued vigorously that Edward had been a ...”

“... that stays NEWS”. READ him: Read HIM.’ The capitalisation is very much of the period, and it may he that the message is as well. For the poet’s death was shortly followed by a critical work, Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era (1974), which placed him at the head of the ‘Men of 1914’, and chronicled in elegiac terms his lifelong struggle to reanimate a ...”

“... to suggest that the figures relate to hard currency rather than human beings. Which, indeed, they may. For those bold spirits who continue to produce CDs of New Music in the traditional Modernist sense, such sums are unimaginable. Content with worldwide sales of two or three thousand units, overjoyed with the occasional nine or ten, and disappointed only when ...”

“... classics would continue to mark much of the scientific project throughout the long modernity which may or may not have now come to an end, wrecked or perhaps just beached on the shores of the Postmodern. Philip Fisher’s new book, however, makes a daring case for the continued relevance of pre-Christian ideas about the ...”

“... Good Book says, come to us all. We all know that each of us will soon disappear from the Earth. David Raup’s book compounds our pessimism by pointing out that – if humans are anything like other animals – the fate awaiting our species as a whole is also an almost certain annihilation. Very few creatures persist for long in evolutionary time. There are ...”

“... who were charged with the maintenance of the scrolls exercised considerable licence, one may infer, in expanding or modifying their contents, incorporating elements of oral lore and inventing new materials. As Toorn trenchantly puts it, ‘the books of the Bible were not designed to be read as unities. They rather compare to archives. A biblical book ...”

“... are received ideas about the Nativity narrative that have no warrant in either version. So, it may be asked, who cares? Yet to look into these matters is to come on problems both interesting and intractable and, to some people, important. The trickiest, the best known and perhaps the most important of these is the Virgin Conception, of which more ...”

“... way of life which, even as described in his own anthology, seems relatively unappealing. Whatever may be said in favour of the country house as a mode of government, way of life, shrine of culture or architectural artifact, there is clearly much to be said against it too, in part because so many country-house owners seem to have been so peculiarly insensitive ...”