“... 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 ...”

“... and wears the same subdued colours, and continues in the same vein for 30 lines. Only a little may divide a poem of this type from Fleur Adcock’s ‘The Soho Hospital for Women’, or ‘Old Man Travelling’, but ‘the little more and how much it is.’ The great danger to poetry today is that these sort of flat sensitive apprehensions ...”

“... Merton Professor of English Literature at Oxford agrees that ‘though they are world famous, they may disappoint modern readers. Some of them consist largely of complicated wordplay, and scarcely engage our feelings at all.’ Equally, he is enthusiastic about the things he loves: Donne, for instance, is celebrated as ‘the greatest English love poet’, and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... have heard’). ‘Barbara,’ Edmund Wilson decided, ‘is really a bad lot’: so bad that when David Pryce-Jones came to write his memoir of Connolly he thought it best to say nothing about her at all. On the other hand, it is part both of her disobliging character and its attraction that in compiling her own memoirs she does nothing to minimise her ...”

“... for military staffs to prepare war plans, or for governments to hint at the use of military force. David Spring shows that Russian leaders knew they had good political, financial, military and social reasons to avoid war, and that their hesitant moves towards army mobilisation were intended only to underscore a firm diplomatic stand, and to deter. The French ...”

“... or the Interior Department, there would have been an audible growl of satisfaction. The Nazi David Duke, it doesn’t pay to forget, got a clear majority of the white vote in the gubernatorial race in Louisiana. And several of the new conservative intake of the Senate and House have made either electoral or political pacts with members of the militia ...”

“... came to Ethiopia in 1769 to look for the source of the Nile and took away with him the Songs of David, Kibre Negest (‘Glory of the Kings’) and the Book of Enoch, which he no doubt considered as souvenirs or going-home presents to himself. As well as being a sacred artefact, the Kibre Negest relates much of Ethiopia’s early history. It was returned to ...”

“... traditional theology, virtue is a matter of energy and enjoyment, and evil mere deprivation. Evil may make a lot of noise, but the dust and heat it raises derive from an incapacity for life, which is why nobody could actually be in hell. To be damned must mean to be dead. All this, however, is bound to look different when the middle classes are in the ...”