“... of the Party. Kelly, who was sentenced to life imprisonment after the 1973 Old Bailey bombing, may or may not be a member of the IRA army council, but he is certainly a member of Sinn Fein: he stood unsuccessfully at last year’s Árd Fheis, or party conference, for election to the Árd Chomhairle – the Party’s ...”

“... the fact that it’s the site most heavily targeted by Hizbullah’s Katyushas and other rockets may not be coincidental. Raining missiles on Israel’s deprived communities is intended as a frightening piece of consciousness raising. My first appointment with the municipality is at the emergency headquarters or ‘war-room’ (the male occupants of these ...”

“... party, both started out as ‘terrorists’. Begin was behind the 1946 bombing of the King David Hotel, which killed nearly a hundred civilians; Shamir planned the 1948 kidnapping and assassination of the UN representative Folke Bernadotte. Yitzhak Rabin, revered among liberal Zionists as a peacemaker, oversaw the deportation of tens of thousands of ...”

“... gift of sight’, how could she have seen who she is supposed to have seen in the first place?This may sound like nitpicking, but it reveals a discrepancy between Plunkett’s critical approach and the way his subject thought about poetry. Frost talked and wrote about what he called a poet’s ‘freedom of the material’, the freedom to ‘move ...”

“... fighting so far. In the course of the last few meetings the English had overcome whatever awe they may have had of the great Spanish array and this time they came in close, firing low at a hundred yards or less (the round-shot of the time was neither accurate nor very dangerous at over two hundred yards, but at one hundred, or as Winter of the Vanguard put it ...”

“... set in Britain and Two and Four in Italy. Within this oscillating progression, journeys abroad may involve returns (hence the first Italian poem is ‘There Again’), while thought is a continuous questing. Time modulates into spatial images that tangle and knot. Of his mother’s later life Robinson writes: Childless, as if you were once more. days ...”

“... but Nelson Mandela’s, shamelessly plundered from James Meek’s essay in the LRB of 26 May. Thistlewood put it more bluntly: ‘Insurrection then became a public duty.’ He did not possess a particle of Mandela’s grace and generosity, but his argument was essentially the same. As the chief justice prepared to deliver the death ...”

“... do so, under the pressure of events, after four students were shot dead at Kent State in Ohio on 4 May 1970. She would appear anywhere she was asked, no matter how small; she stuffed envelopes, manned phone banks, moved to grey Detroit when that was what it took to get the 1971 ‘Winter Soldier’ hearings off the ground, in which a procession of veterans ...”

“... in the Kingdom of Savoy in 1851 was ensured by the votes of the Turin Jewish community. This may help to explain the rapid emergence of Jews on the Western and Central European public scene. So far as I am aware, they hardly appear in the French Revolution or among its European sympathisers, except, as one might expect, in the bourgeois milieu of the ...”

“... spreads (increments over Libor) they offered. Two experienced industry observers, Mark Adelson and David Jacob, suggest that a fatal point was reached when CDOs became almost the only purchasers of the riskier tranches of mortgage-backed securities. Previously, those tranches had either been guaranteed against default by specialist insurers, or bought by canny ...”

“... broached brandy bottle is characteristic of Hughes’s practical canniness. Two months later (22 May 1956) he is telling Olwyn:I have met a first-rate American poetess. She really is good. Certainly one of the best female poets I ever read, and a damn sight better than the run of good male. Her main enthusiasm at present is me, and she thinks my verses are ...”

“... to go through the details of the death certificate. Name: Hugh Swynnerton Thomas. Date of death: 7 May 2017. Your relation to him? Son. A few years ago, when I asked my father why he wasn’t going to the house in south-west France where he had for several summers spent a few weeks, his answer sounded straightforward. ‘Too far from Figeac,’ he said. Too ...”

“... by a mountain of a man dressed in a jellaba. He tells me to hurry up the stairs – the briefing may already have started. Upstairs is a large room with whitewashed walls and grey carpet tiles. On one of the walls a banner proclaims that there is no God but God. A panel of young, bearded men are sitting under the banner, facing a semi-circular swathe of TV ...”

“... it is determined by merit. And that, in a nutshell, is the history of the long 20th century.It may be a parody, but this little narrative encapsulates one of the structuring claims of contemporary public debate. We can argue over the extent to which merit is, in fact, now the chief determinant of reward, but there is remarkably wide agreement that it ...”

“... sent Colonel Lawrence DSO, CB into the ranks of the Army and Air Force, the lure of anthropology may have played a part. The Mint, published posthumously as an account of the foul-mouthed soldiery he knew, lineal descendants of the goddams of Harfleur, could have been the product of a cool, interested expedition among the marsh Arabs. The boy Ned Lawrence ...”