“... many questions for its own good. How does it feel to feel that you are – and then again that you may not be – except that you know you must be – you are – it is expected of you – a Messiah? How does it feel to have a Messiah in the family – as your son – when you devoutly wish to have your Messiah somewhere else, preferably in the next world? How ...”

“... Football: ‘It was the most democratic game and the most international. By it the mark of England may well remain in the world when the rest of her influence has vanished.’ On the subject of birth control few would quarrel with his memorable advice: ‘The historian should bear in mind that between about 1880 and 1940 or so, he has on his hands a frustrated ...”

“... into a belligerent party and made their humanitarian function yet more difficult. Old UN hands may recall the Congo, but at least some Americans must be remembering their experience in the Lebanon in 1983, when, having become equally involved in the local disputes and suffering heavy losses in consequence, they had to stage a humiliating withdrawal. The ...”

“... there yet.” And so ...’ This was Petrov telling a story as we sat around a bivouac fire in May 1970, somewhere in the flat lands east of Muié (which is south of Luso, which is ‘some place down there’), so as to explain the wrongful reputation given to his people, the Angolans, by their neighbours in Southern Africa. Although his own language is ...”

“... go popular, that we go American, with threats that if we do not we shall be labelled, as the case may be, cold, academic or parochial. Since the Forties, various translators have put pressure on us to share, even emulate, the feelings of East Europeans who have had a wider and harsher political experience than ourselves. Yes, these are the squalls that have ...”

“... or quasi-coalition regimes beholden to Moscow.’ If that was indeed the intention – and it may well have been – there would have been little objection to it on the part of Russia’s wartime allies, who in 1945 were in no mood to peer too closely behind a semi-respectable democratic façade. A policy of ‘Finlandisation’ in East and Central Europe ...”

“... For as the OED informs us, the crowd is only a throng or dense multitude, while the mob may mean the lower orders, rabble, tumultuous crowd or a promiscuous assemblage of persons. In fact, the connotations of ‘crowd’ are more mobile and more complex than they may look at first glance. According to ...”

“... the kind of man his modern admirers would welcome to the Senior Common Room. This last conclusion may well be true. Yet I do not think that many of the others survive re-exposure to the texts. Bunyan’s Relation of his Imprisonment is terribly revealing. Judge Kelyng was no doubt a bully and Clerk Cobb a time-server, but between them they seem to have done ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Newland’s collection, Eric Helleiner is suitably cautious about the power this confers. Japan may have more leverage over its borrowers than the Saudis had after the first oil-price rise in 1973. But it has much less than the United States was able to exert throughout the Fifties and Sixties. If there is a power in Japan’s new economic ...”

“... but that the appetite for conspiracies is insatiable – that’s why there are so many. This may well be a post-Kennedy perception, part of what the death caused rather than of what caused it. But against that we have to set everything we know about Oswald, let alone anyone else. He liked conspiracies, even if he wasn’t in one, even if he had to run ...”

“... of ideas she ever encountered, or whether her determination that ‘the invidious censures which may ensue from striking into a path of literature rarely trodden by my sex, will not ... keep me mute in the cause of liberty and virtue’ had been forged earlier than this, and independently. Whatever the answer, the rigidity of her ideas undoubtedly limited ...”

“... a gathering doubt about the point of sustaining an imperial-style monarchy, coupled with what may be the final collapse of the royal family as an even faintly plausible symbol of what is best in national life – Linda Colley’s book is an essential prehistory of this whole (though not wholly melancholy) catalogue of anxieties. The British, Colley ...”

“... of America, a refracted image in the American looking-glass.’ Racialist fictions at this level may be readily identifiable. But Gates, not above a certain archness when he speaks of ‘the great intellectual Western racialists such as Francis Bacon, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Thomas Jefferson and G.W.F. Hegel’, finds racialist ‘truths’ less easy to ...”

“... for strong-mindedness: his own was the one person Genghiz had feared and respected.) Kitbuga may have been inspired to try playing David at Goliath’s Spring: at any rate he attacked the Sultan (who inspired his own soldiers with the cry of ‘O Islam’) without the usual Mongol craft and precaution, and lost his army and his life. Had Hulagu been able ...”