“... in Nicaragua, is also a priest, and at one stage spent two years training as a Trappist with Thomas Merton. He abandoned that road and created a community on an island in the vast Lake of Nicaragua where he wrote some of his greatest and most deeply revolutionary poetry. Eventually, he was compelled to abandon his contemplative, artistic protest and join ...”

“... in 1982’. But why ‘supposedly’? Was it not possible that the Israeli invasion, which cost more than 17 thousand lives (most of them civilians), should have produced just such violent acts of revenge against Israel’s principal ally? Bradlee says that Israel’s policy against ‘terrorists’ – a policy with which North, of course, thoroughly ...”

“... a celebration of hip and chaotic capitalism. It is written in the regulation giddy style that Thomas Frank and the Baffler school in Chicago have dissected so well. Once again we are presented with the lives of the saints of middle management, Leadbeater’s magnificent pilgrims are full of daring. They struggle for personal fulfilment and venture ...”

“... bayed most insistently for blood in the prelude to the Iraq War – the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman demanded that France be voted ‘Off the Island’ (i.e. out of the Security Council) for its presumption in opposing America’s drive to war – are today the most confident when asserting their monopoly of insight into world affairs. The same ...”

“... she must give an account of her beliefs to a presiding jury. Against all likelihood, the book is more affecting than anything else he has written, and, I think, deeply confessional. Singer’s suggestion of evasion is unfair, at least by the time one has reached the remarkable expiration, like a dying breath, with which the book closes. Aristotle ...”

“... for decades provided Gissing materials and support to other scholars, but Delany is the first in more than 25 years to produce a full-scale biography, and the first to engage in an all-out struggle to come to terms with Gissing the man, leaving the novels to play useful supporting roles. If the misery threatens to become contagious, it is not for lack of ...”

“... place the headquarters of the two institutions in Washington, where he feared they would function more as appendages of the American state than as truly international bodies, but their location in the American capital was all but a fait accompli, requiring only a handful of votes from the odd array of allies the US had assembled at the meeting. Keynes’s ...”

“... densely-textured documentation, a special quality of charged impressionism (sometimes tendentious, more often honourably concerned with generous perspectives and panoramic insight), the embattled moral fervour, which established the earlier book as a classic of historical scholarship and indeed of English letters. It has some occasional irritants, an ...”

“... been disregarded or ignored by decision-makers.’ Despite President Johnson’s and, still more, President Nixon’s interest in covert action, neither of them – in Mr Laqueur’s view – thought very highly of the intelligence community. If secret intelligence has not had a greater influence on policy, it is at least partly because policymakers ...”

“... years since the so-called London Journal 1762-1763 created its naughty little sensation. Only one more is due in the present series (there is a Research Edition too, but that is another and longer story), which will take us to his death, aged 54, in 1795. Perhaps the strut is becoming a waddle. The self-absorption and mediocrity of mind remain unabated, but ...”

“... by John Maxwell, or the vulgar publisher William Tinsley’s Tinsley’s Magazine, in which Thomas Hardy had his first success with the serial of A Pair of Blue Eyes. (Houghton’s explanation for not indexing these three journals is revealing: ‘they consist primarily of fiction, and fiction seems sufficiently represented.’) At times, the Index’s ...”

“... twelve perhaps. He was always doing things like that. He liked gardening and wanted me to partake more fully of its pleasures. After his teaching obligations of the spring term at Berkeley ended every year, he would apply himself to his own small garden, sheltered and south-east facing. He seemed to enjoy organising and cultivating his little patch of ...”

“... Keith Douglas was always conscious of Isaac Rosenberg behind his shoulder, Alun Lewis of Edward Thomas. But the idea of modern warfare as one thing and of poetic response to it as another seems, in retrospect, almost Churchillian in its fixedness. Back then, although we loved the old rogue for the rodomontade and sheer cheek of his rhetoric, we got rid of ...”

“... the 1970s. An air of homely neglect hung over the broad avenues of large semis. In London there is more money than space, or time; here, it was the opposite. The Ellington and Hereson School is a set of shining white blocks built in 2007 as part of Labour’s PFI programme. As well as Farage, Charlie Leys, the sixth-former who had organised and was chairing ...”

“... into his stride he was insisting he had a better degree than his opponent, a bigger house, a more beautiful wife, taller children and – definitive proof of his fitness to govern – thicker semen. This was too much, even for Ecuadorians long used to the macho exaggerations of the Latin American stump. The electorate woke up, laughed themselves silly ...”