“... the Theocratic Ministry School, and comprised of four talks. Talk one (fifteen minutes) was given by an elder or senior ministerial servant and drew on material from a standard reference book. Talk two (five minutes) was a Bible reading with an introduction and conclusion and was delivered by a younger brother. Talk three ...”

“... metal teeth. Joaquín Sancho Margelí’s family, who requested the exhumation, had said he could be identified by his silver dentures. The other skeleton was probably that of Elías Mohino Berzosa, whose family also wanted his remains exhumed. They had never known for sure if the men were buried near the north-east wall of ...”

“... men called democrats,’ Wordsworth wrote to his friend William Mathews in 1794. Much the same can be said of Coleridge, on the evidence of his letters and publications of the mid-1790s. By the early decades of this century, British, French and American scholarship concurred in finding both poets to ...”

“... their right to voice these irrational opinions. I have battled in print against people like David Irving (Hitler’s War), who misuse history to advance their dangerous ideologies, and, at the other end of the scale, men like Martin Gray (For those I loved), who use these appalling events for self-aggrandisement. Interestingly, nobody minds much about ...”

“... Anglo-Indian middle classes was probably not as immediate and direct as it has been made out to be in subsequent colonial and nationalist narratives, it brought to an end a period of cultural exchange between different races. The late 18th and the first half of the 19th century had seen the commercial and colonial expansion of the East India Company in ...”

“... bit out of it all’. As a narrative device it is brilliant, setting the scene for what is to be a bleak story, introducing some of the leading characters, and insinuating that the author was eyewitness to an intimate gathering. It comes, then, as something of a surprise to learn that this evocative account was written ...”

“... des Belges’ and he, apparently, remained on the coast. The visit which was remembered by Jessie Conrad had a purpose. Casement had read Heart of Darkness and he wanted Conrad to support him in the case he was making against atrocities in the Congo. ‘I am glad you read the Heart of D., tho’ of course it’s an awful fudge,’ Conrad had written ...”

“... that he hath a secret to keep.Sir Humphrey ApplebyWhat​ is the opposite of a secret? It can’t be something that everybody knows, since there’s nothing that’s known to everyone and all secrets are known to somebody. A secret is a bit of knowledge that certain people know and certain others are intended not to know. Information doesn’t want to ...”

“... unfortunates for whom the world is a melancholy cage of privilege in which their every whim can be immediately satisfied from that of ordinary grafting millionaires and multi-millionaires. There is an unbridgeable chasm between Haves and Have-Yachts. And bigger yachts. And yachts with helipads and missile-launch systems. With Picassos and Warhols and ...”

“... this month, which happens every two or three years. The next blue moon on New Year’s Eve won’t be until 2028 so it’s the last one I shall ever see – and it’s also the first that I ever knew about. The moon is strong enough to cast sharp shadows, with the sky blue except for occasional reefs of cloud so that with the snow still lying in drifts on the ...”

“... resembles Ted Hughes’s Crow appears to a bereaved husband and his sons (the father happens to be writing a critical book about Hughes), qualifies as a novel by the familiar logic of its not fitting any other category. It is rich in hints about the place, or non-place, of death in our lives. People used to die, now they ...”

“... La Gran Scena’s shows were loving parodies of operatic set pieces. (Ira Siff can regularly be heard these days on Radio 3’s relays of opera from the Met, expounding the nuances of repertoire and production.) There was necessarily some teasing of the diva ego: Vera Galupe-Borszkh, milking the applause after a spectacular number, would moan ...”

“... foreign, as terrified of the unfolding truth as of mailed anthrax, it is a society made menacing by a notion of God’s great plan. America is tolerance-challenged, integrity-poor, frightened to death, and yet, beneath its patriotic hosannahs, a country in delirium before the recognition that it might have spent the last three years not only squandering the ...”

“... first elected in 1982, long before that distant nirvana of ‘fifteen, ten years ago’ described by Michael Fallon, when trying to touch up young female researchers, lobby correspondents or political activists was ‘acceptable’, just harmless ‘flirtation’. Some male MPs believe they still live in that era; while one insisted that it ‘absolutely does ...”

“... Certificate of Whiteness Scheme’ has collapsed.* The TV show got round such awkwardness by dint of hardly mentioning race at all, casting black and brown-skinned actors colour-blindly as the heroine’s husband and daughter, and (as in Hollywood convention) as the heroine’s brave – in some ways maybe too brave – best friend. But the situation ...”