“... so ‘hysterically discreet’ that he got married by proxy; who, in the words of the writer Robert Neumann, ‘spent his life on the run. From the Great War to Switzerland. From the symbolic firing-squad across the Channel. From Blitzed London to the safety of provincial Bath. From Hitler’s threatened invasion of England to the USA. From Roosevelt’s ...”

“... inevitably develops a few singular, unassimilable and slightly silly convictions. (The graph may be parabolic, with the highest incidence of convictions – and the legal resonance is invited – found among those who have spent the most time thinking and those who have spent next to no time thinking.) My own such amateur conviction is that the life of ...”

“... The oligarchs who bought up some of the most expensive property in the world, including in London, may once have been members of the Communist Party, but they were also opportunists with no commitment to anything other than power and lining their own pockets. The vacuum created by the collapse of the party system has been filled by different things in ...”

“... about this paternalist relationship we cannot easily say. That period of absconding in the 1750s may suggest that he found it irksome at that stage of his life, but there is plenty of more general evidence that he reciprocated Johnson’s affection. He named his first son Samuel, undoubtedly after Johnson, and when that child died in infancy he named his ...”

“... see, and represent what they’d seen. (The originals of many of Haeckel’s published pictures may have been wall-charts used in classrooms and public demonstrations: that’s one reason they look like they do.) Specialist students were expected to look at embryos themselves – they were by Haeckel’s time beginning to make serious use of microscopy ...”

“... do not know the city very well,’ he later admitted. He also admitted that as a result ‘there may have been a good many who had not heard the proclamation.’ But then Dyer also said that ‘it was no longer a question merely of dispersing the crowd; but one of producing a sufficient moral effect, from a military point of view, not only on those who were ...”

“... style, echoing Aldous Huxley’s Crome Yellow, whose satirical nihilism was all the rage. Pym and Robert Liddell, a close friend from Oxford, wrote reams to each other in Ivy Compton-Burnett’s brittle manner, relishing her exposure of the tyranny of family relations; she had a Stevie Smith phase too, mimicking the bubbling prose of Novel on Yellow ...”

“... heresy’: the notion that supreme law should stand above parliaments, that judges in a democracy may reverse the will of an elected government if it violates a constitution. This storm has been brewing for a long time. Take a late 20th-century example: during one of those recurring leak panics, somebody in Whitehall revealed to a journalist that a cabinet ...”

“... know enough about foreigners to be able to tell if they were whom they claimed to be. Moreover, as Robert Service reminds us in Spies and Commissars, in the first, formative years after the Bolshevik Revolution, when almost all the capitalist powers sent military forces to support the Bolsheviks’ opponents in the Civil War, most of the resident ...”

“... mind. He is growing into himself. ‘We have a bunch of dandy fellows in our unit,’ he writes in May 1918, ‘and are going to have a wonderful time.’ There has never been a more self-conscious ‘soldier’ in the history of literature. From New York: It was funny yesterday when we donned our uniforms. We put them on yest aft and went to supper and then ...”

“... by Matthew Paris, the monk of St Albans. Any biographer is spoiled for choice among the sources: Robert of Gloucester, Roger of Wendover, Thomas Wykes of Osney, Alderman fitzThedmar of London – all of them salty and unrestrained in their comments, whether on the uselessness of Henry as a war leader or the brutality of Simon de Montfort’s massacre of the ...”

“... Todd and King speculate that the choice of subjects – religious men and courtly women – may have been dictated by the shared technical blueprint of the automata: each machine needs some sort of curtain, robe or dress to hide its internal mechanism and create the illusion.The mechanical monk does resemble Diego de Alcalá (or popular representations ...”

“... year North Korea tested its first nuclear device. Sanctions did little to prevent this; they may have had the opposite effect. But by exploiting foreign dependence on the dollar, the US government had shown that it too had a powerful new weapon. Economic blockades are not new. The Peloponnesian War was triggered by one in the fifth century BCE; the ...”

“... the Northern Hemisphere would benefit greatly from a thin Selected; but even his slackest failures may be the sorts of thing a poet has to risk to become as original a writer as he now is. He also writes strongly felt verse-essays, expository or polemical: their titles name their genre and topic (‘Second Essay on Interest: The Emu’). These poems often rely ...”

“... about booming and book wars. ‘So,’ Ford remarks, ‘if one can keep oneself out of it, one may present a picture of a sort of world and time.’ He never did keep himself out of the picture, of course, and never meant to. The autobiography in Return to Yesterday often amounts to little more than local colour. Ford ...”