“... this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and I – I took the one less travelled by, And that has made all the difference. Teasing Thomas about his hesitations between poetry and prose becomes in retrospect a rather darker meditation on choice and its consequences for both poets. Thomas, however, felt that Frost ...”

“... an escapee British general, Michael Gambier-Parry, who was renowned as a forger. O’Flaherty took him to Irish parties and introduced him to senior German officers as an Irish doctor. Gambier-Parry found safe lodgings with a group of nuns, the Blue Sisters.Another figure who aided those who had to hide or escape was Prince Filippo Doria Pamphilj, who ...”

“... in the political arena. For centuries the people who owned the land in Britain ran Parliament. It took a hundred years of struggle to give the people the power to choose and remove their political managers – MPs and ministers. If we can trust the country to democracy, why on earth can’t we trust individual firms to the people who work in them? … A firm ...”

“... on every door in the parish to record the names of those who lived there and their occupations. It took the jurors three full days in December 1684 to cover Chilvers Coton, logging the location of all the dwellings, which were later marked on a map. The jurors described and itemised the landscape: angled red roofs, gables and windows, the location of chimneys ...”

“... a book which will demonstrate to a later generation that not all Conservative politicians took leave of their senses in the Eighties. He must therefore contemplate the last election result with mixed feelings. Since he has always argued that it would end that way – and that the Conservatives deserved it – he must have a certain satisfaction. On ...”

“... of reparation to her slighted mother. Her feminist commitment was sustained for decades, and it took many forms. She worked for legal reform, particularly for the recognition of autonomy for married women. She founded the campaigning English Woman’s Journal. She helped establish the Kensington Society, which pioneered women’s demands for suffrage. She ...”

“... century moved on, Wisenschaft, a portmanteau word connoting the highest possible academic culture, took hold of the British academic imagination. Would be scholars, slogging away at the education of young men who behaved like boys, rose as from the dead to salute the hard-working German professors on their magic mountains who did not have to shape the ...”

“... manipulation and the ‘selfish gene’. The dispiriting apogee to this curve of ‘hope’ took the form for me of a sad request from an aspiring Indian PhD student to seek the name(s) of god(s) in the sequences of DNA. So, how did we descend to this vacuous replacing of one level of ignorance by another, and the proclaiming of each in turn as the ...”

“... passages of the Bible and on myths of Saxon freedom, while the American and French Revolutions took Republican Rome as a model. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that, since the 1820s, images of Ancient Greece, and of Athens in particular, have usually served a progressive function, even though antebellum Southern writers used them to demonstrate the ...”

“... Marx made a communist of me’ sounds stirring enough. On 13 November 1887 the 31-year-old Shaw took part in the famous, and illegal, demonstration for free speech which came to be known as Bloody Sunday. The march set out from Clerkenwell Green, Annie Besant and Shaw being among the many who carried banners. Annie Besant, Eleanor Marx and the other leftist ...”

“... them unable to provide the accustomed level of support to any deployed force of the size that took part in the Gulf War of 1991. The Gulf War demonstrated the validity of our case. In order to be viable, every armoured, artillery, engineer or infantry unit had to be reinforced from the remainder of the Army. This denuded the units from which ...”

“... camp personnel, Gestapo and police, or participants in the ‘euthanasia’ programme). No wonder John McCloy, the generally patient American High Commissioner, complained about the ‘abysmal ignorance’ displayed by many who wrote to him. Frei brings out very well the pathos that attached to incarcerated former members of the Wehrmacht, and the ...”

“... the year before Reich arrived in the country, and ideas about liberation which fermented in Europe took on a new aspect. The American establishment (notably the Rockefeller Foundation) started off by generously funding the seeds of the sexual revolution – on the grounds that if you knew the facts you could control them – and sponsored Kinsey’s ...”

“... human rights record, and for the second year in a petrostate’ (the previous two conferences took place in Sharm El-Sheikh and Dubai). The UK has outsized influence in Azerbaijan, thanks mainly to BP, the country’s biggest foreign investor. In September 2023, senior BP executives travelled to Baku for the centenary of the birth of Heydar Aliyev, a ...”

“... the event, buying a ticket to a gig at the Monarch on 1 June 2001. So he sent me the money, eBay took its cut, I sent him the CD, we provided each other with positive feedback, eBay item number 250,026,512,619 dropped from public view, and I started looking around for other things to sell. The first item to be traded on eBay, according to popular legend, was ...”