“... the Sunday in John Junor’s long days, then the Daily under Roy Wright. Beaverbrook had been dead by then for ten years. The amiable son, who touchingly refused the title in a spirit of unaffected and perhaps warranted humility, reigned rather than ruled in his place and was known officially as Sir Max Aitken, unofficially, after his gallant war, as ...”

“... Jews, for whom Mordecai Richler makes his complaint (though not only for them), are outnumbered by 11 to one in the English-speaking community. The English are outnumbered five to one by the French, but the French are outnumbered by three to one in Canada as a whole. In North ...”

“... and so does the Filipino woman, and the sad-looking Egyptian who has been telling everyone he must be on the flight back to Nairobi at four o’clock. I am the only one who is going on, to the Save the Children Fund compound. Ahmed turns the car around and there are only the two of us in it. The guards open the tall metal gates to let us out, and there is no ...”

“... is to follow. These furthermore are ‘Cambridge histories’ in the classic sense, laid down by Lord Acton a century ago: general editors co-ordinate a series of chapters on related topics, each written by an authority in the field it defines. Academic culture today teems with multi-author volumes, many no more than ...”

“... to, the rattle of machine-gun fire evaporates in unlocatable confusion and unless you happen to be in the street where a grenade lands it might as well be an event in another war. The shelling can be both fiercely local and exasperatingly distant. In Otes we found the epicentre of the ...”

“... mosque, which, even more than Jerusalem’s al-Haram al-Sharif, is guarded with great visibility by Israeli soldiers. The entrances of the Haram are hundreds of metres away from the two mosques, al-Aqsa and Umar; at these doors, it is Palestinian security men, doubtless under Israeli supervision, who let people in and out. In the case of the Hebron mosque ...”

“... In the early Eighties, the main debate – though quarrel might be the better word – among historians of British art in its ‘great century’, from Hogarth to Turner, was about landscape. But whatever the differences between them, the most vocal participants in this debate were all finally on the same side, arguing with a largely silent (either stunned or indifferent) opposition to establish that there was a politics of landscape painting, that it needed to be understood in the context of landownership, agricultural improvement, the management of the rural poor, the changing economic relation between town and country and so on ...”

“... very notion of a universal humanity – was replaced, as he saw it and as many have seen it since, by the depiction of a specific and most ordinary visible world: a particular place, its towns, its landscape, its skies, domestic settings, the manners of its people. In Dutch paintings, Fromentin wrote, man was as put back in his place or simply done ...”

“... 731 should stand as a warning – not so much against human wickedness, about which little can be done, but against gullibility. Unlike his German colleague Dr Mengele, who was a bit of a hack, Dr Ishii was a respected scholar in his field – which was military medicine, or more specifically, biological warfare. Despite his reputation for being an ...”

“... does not exclude the possibility that the former USS Phoenix, survivor of Pearl Harbour, was sunk by Mrs Thatcher, not because the 44-year-old threatened our boys, but because politically Mrs Thatcher could not afford peace. Readers of the London Review of Books include among their number a significant proportion of those who operate in the stratosphere of ...”

“... Aristocracy have been connected with Burke’s Peerage. One doesn’t expect genealogists to be particularly indulgent: their job, after all, is to separate the sheep from the goats. But these two are soft-hearted and broadminded to a fault, or so social historians, as well as some of their subjects, might think. They draw the demarcation-line between ...”

“... What became of the Modernist movement? It was initiated by Pound and Eliot about the time of the First World War, and in America it set off a further wave of innovation (often referred to as ‘post-Modernism’) after the Second. Beats, Black Mountain Poets, the New York school of the Fifties – all these and others, though clearly different, are unimaginable without Pound, early Eliot, William Carlos Williams and perhaps Wallace Stevens as forerunners ...”

“... It is delightful and unexpected to open a book by a public Eminence to find the blue wings of Morpho cypris spread out before one. Then a few pages later there is the green and orange of Ornithoptera paradisea. This is, however, not a work of lepidopterology, except in the sense that it records that the author was ‘born into a family in which lepidopterology was a ruling passion ...”

“... storytellers of all nations improvise a fictional narrative in accordance with a theme chosen by the judges. The odd thing is that D.M. Thomas is not a storyteller. Swallow is the sort of book that attracts descriptions like ‘metafiction’, ‘fabulation’ and ‘self-referential’ – words that came into vogue at the same time as ...”

“... after 1789. In the hundred years after 1750, Britain’s social fabric was tried and tormented by the strains of unprecedented population growth and pioneering economic change. Add to this the world’s most sophisticated press network, a corrupt and supposedly amorphous state structure, and the impact and example of the American and French ...”