“... to use her as a mole, but they never got around to asking her for information, and by the time the war started she had drifted away from the Party. Around the same time Hart joined the war effort by going to work (hired on Jenifer’s recommendation) for MI5, where he was regarded as invaluable. In the course of their ...”

“... whole of English history, certainly since 1066, has been a history of plunder by the governing class and its officials and other hangers-on.’ (More had written, and Hoskins quoted the line three times: ‘So God help me, I can perceive nothing but a conspiracy of rich men procuring their own commodities under the name and title of a ...”

“... was encouraged; and much was done to promote the interests of the newly enfranchised working class. Sidney Webb chafed at the untidiness of municipal autonomy, but he was aware of the potential of civic government. He recognised that the Victorian burgher may have seen himself as the arch-opponent of collectivism – ‘“Socialism, Sir?” he’d ...”

“... or Marsh Arabs. Like most residents of Maysan, the Marsh Arabs are Shia, and after the 1991 Gulf War they participated in a rebellion against Saddam. Their punishment – Saddam drained the marshes and destroyed their entire way of life – was one of the greatest environmental-cultural abuses of recent years. Wetlands became desert, Marsh Arabs became urban ...”

“... so out of sight? I went to track down three canvases by Coldstream in the stores of the Imperial War Museum. They hung at waist height on the fourth sliding rack of the Cs, facing into a recess, from which position the glare of the corridor striplight fought against them from behind; nonetheless, they kept a comfortable dignity in this limbo. Their paintwork ...”

“... way into the navy by offering the government the use of his family’s boat during the First World War. As Lloyd Steven Sieden explains in his 1989 biography, the navy formed Fuller’s intellectual ideals. Ever after, he aspired to be as comprehensively informed and autonomous as a ship’s captain in the age before radio, when there was no higher authority ...”

“... true, is likely to feature in any anthology or critical account of the poetry of the Second World War, and assiduous scholars of both Hill and Ashbery have explored Prince’s possible influences on their early work. And yet, despite the eloquent advocacy of these two recently departed giants, his work remains a specialised taste. A YouTube video of him ...”

“... Bertrand Russell, who was lecturing in America, found himself trapped there by the outbreak of war. His situation was made worse because of his publicly expressed views on sex and marriage: for instance, the proposition, in Marriage and Morals, that ‘the total amount of undesired sex endured by women is probably greater in marriage than in ...”

“... and grew up in Katamon, a neighbourhood dominated by Christian Arabs before the 1948 War. (A third son, Iddo, was born in 1952.) In 1963, the boys were uprooted when their father, convinced that he had been blacklisted by academia, moved the family to Elkins Park, a leafy suburb of Philadelphia. For a Revisionist family, leaving Israel was no ...”

“... paused; he didn’t want to mislead these people: what was on offer was not a ‘humanitarian war’ but an informal Camp David. ‘It needn’t even be the United States,’ he continued. ‘It could be a great man. It could be Nelson Mandela … or Bill Clinton.’The beards were unimpressed. One of the few beardless men in the audience rose to his feet ...”

“... of the most glittering constellations of the new century. Burgeoning before and during the Great War, its native development was largely cut off by the Russian Revolution. The Bolsheviks, who came from the earlier style of intelligentsia, had little understanding of the value of the newer one, and – in no mood to tolerate disinterested research or deviant ...”

“... African regimes, ‘free world’ or Soviet bloc patronage and, in the aftermath of the Cold War, from the stultifying institutions which all of these have bequeathed to Africa. Despite its terrible difficulties, Davidson’s Africa is a continent of hope. In both the customary and the more fashionable sense, his work is affirmative – often stubbornly ...”

“... One of Devine’s important achievements is to remind us that Lowland Scotland also had a peasant class that was dispossessed, its fate obscured by the ‘extraordinary glamour’ of Highland culture which, ‘whether in authentic or invented form … has marginalised the history of the rural Lowlands’. The disappearance of this ...”

“... yard. Police patrolling the outside of the yard. We thought: “What the hell’s this? Is it a war?” Which is what it turned out to be, virtually.’The police marched up to the bottom of the rig and shouted up to the men. Increasingly militarised and emboldened by their new powers, they were spoiling for a fight. ‘They said: “Some of ours may get ...”

“... the door to universal murder.’ Zawahiri finally set Egypt aside to concentrate on bin Laden’s war against America only in 1997, when Egypt as a whole turned against his methods in revulsion. The catalyst was an attack by a group of Zawahiri allies on tourists at Luxor. A small group of jihadis in police uniforms crippled any tourists within range by ...”