“... the feel of the Hobsbawm file, its heft. A PF is like a medical file: it starts with one flimsy page, and then, as the diagnostics proceed, its growth accompanies that of the disease it charts (another similarity is that the actual person becomes more and more abstracted). PF 211,764 weighs in at a thousand or so pages, collated chronologically as ...”

“... faith.’ Whether Harold Nicolson, inviting Osbert Sitwell, Raymond Mortimer, Peter Quennell and Alan Pryce-Jones to contribute to its pages, saw the ‘new faith’ in the same light as Mosley isn’t quite clear. ‘Week by week,’ Mosley exclaimed on the front page, ‘we shall put before you new vistas into the ...”

“... As Jeremy Lewis observes, it was a remarkably handsome newspaper, much more spacious in its page layouts and crisper in its black/white contrasts than its rival, the Sunday Times, which looked untidy and grey by comparison. Throughout the 1950s it was the dominant ‘quality’ Sunday paper, certainly in its cultural and political influence among the ...”

“... was nothing clearer in Riding’s mind than the disappearing thoughts which make it onto the page; the writing, as it exists for us, is really all there is or ever was. Either hypothesis can be read in a manner unflattering to the poet. We like our poets at least to tender us an illusion that they are giving us their all, and that the all they have to ...”

“... of reduction. In keeping with local custom, this important strategic decision was slipped into page 76 of the government’s Integrated Review of Security, Defence, Development and Foreign Policy. Britain is replacing its Vanguard submarines with four bigger Dreadnought-class boats, which are due to arrive in the early 2030s. The government has also ...”

“... York City Bar Association (April 2004) and the American Bar Association (August 2004), and the 300-page Mikolashek report (July 2004), in which the army’s inspector general reported on detainee operations. It has been widely claimed, as it is here by Danner, that the establishment of separate inquiries reporting on bits and pieces of the Abu Ghraib affair as ...”

“... Ogedemgbe, the Oxford-educated daughter of a corrupt millionaire, begins the war as mistress to Alan Grey, our man in Lagos. But as the country descends into civil war, she becomes a soldier and then volunteers to cross the country to persuade the Biafran leader to lay down his arms. Her journey is horrific: she is gang-raped in front of her mother, she ...”

“... The one genre in which Parker didn’t complain about duplication, on either the stage or the page, was crime. She confessed herself ‘a confirmed user of Whodunnits’.If reviews were more fun in the 1920s, that’s partly because mass culture was new and critics still believed they could cut through its excesses with sheer force of personality. There ...”

“... access to certain sites and certain subjects. Griffiths: When a user in China tries to load a web page, their ISP pings a list of forbidden URLs and types of content. If the page is not banned, the request is passed to an internet access point which handles routing traffic to servers all over China and around the ...”

“... tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches’ they got while pulling the sets down. (Almost every page of My Name Is Barbra contains a detailed description of a meal.) In the fifth play of the season, she got a bit part as a flirtatious office worker. She was surprised to see the following day that she was the subject of a horny review in the local ...”

“... than the Book of Revelation. Orwell had Eton and the military police to draw on for 1984, and Alan Moore (V for Vendetta) had Orwell. What’s interesting is that for this ‘entirely new departure’ James stayed so close to the sense that runs through all her work of the horror of human intimacy, of touch (‘a collection of bones loosely held together ...”

“... relaxed and the journalists went home. The Mboya assassination takes up just a few lines on page 203 of The Politics of the Independence of Kenya, but stands as a measure of the extent to which contemporary reporting is biased by the received wisdom of the day. Nothing Kyle says actually contradicts the tribal rivalry interpretation of the assassination ...”

“... gone blind, and Christ was the Messiah.’ Railton does his work only too well and on the last page we see one of his younger kinsmen, who disappeared in 1917 in Soviet Russia with other British agents, back in England in the Thirties, at Cambridge, briefing the undergraduate Donald Railton who has already been recruited as a mole. This is stirring ...”

“... that is blazingly radical. Well, once again, you could argue that myth has overtaken reality. As Alan Plater points out, Jimmy Porter is far from being a working-class hero. By trade, he is a very small shopkeeper (he runs a sweet stall). When he isn’t enjoying himself slumming around with Cliff, he’s berating the workers for being noisy at the ...”

“... ago. There is a certain amount of unjustly neglected travel writing, such as the work of the late Alan Booth. But Japan has never attracted the attention of a Chatwin or a Naipaul, let alone fostered a Kipling, a Somerset Maugham, a Hemingway or a Paul Bowles. No one has had a greater yearning or been better qualified to fill this gap than Donald ...”