“... then complain about your wages.’ Hammond was an original, a poor farm boy with no parents who took every chance he was offered (along with quite a few he wasn’t) and rose to become a celebrated performing rider in the bullrings of Spain. He kept a journal assiduously as he went, and wrote up his Memoirs in four volumes with hand-drawn ...”

“... Things grew still more troublesome when civilians in the shape of partisans or guerrillas took up arms themselves. In Spain, for instance, the French attempted to treat all partisans as criminals, an action they repeated in Russia. The British took the same attitude in 1798 when they accorded to the French invaders ...”

“... verging on modesty.’ Three centuries later, in 1956, David Harris Willson’s biography took the hostile line. Scottish historians tended to be fairer, prompting Jenny Wormald to ask in 1983 whether James was ‘two kings or one?’, so different were his historical reputations north and south of the border. Wormald and other historians have done ...”

“... history: from the celebration of genius it sometimes threatens to become, from elegy. Ford took literature seriously, but not for granted. Insofar as Return to Yesterday is a portrait of the artist as a young man, it is the portrait of a young man who for much of the time would rather be a subaltern, a historian, a pig farmer, indeed anything at ...”

“... team into the sea in honour of the chariot-driving Sun, their patron divinity. Sacrifice generally took place not in temples but out of doors. Altars could be huge staired monuments in the shape of a squared U, like the gigantic Altar of Zeus from Pergamum which takes up one (enormous) room in Berlin’s Pergamonmuseum. More often they were minimal affairs, a ...”

“... popinjay of scented boudoirs’. His voice initially had a high-pitched note, and after he took voice lessons, ‘its calculated changes in pitch sounded like a car changing gear.’ Duff Cooper called him an ‘adulterous, canting, slobbering Bolshie’. When Mosley switched over to Labour in 1924, his new colleagues were equally suspicious of ...”

“... are many officers, including generals and admirals, who understood that the oath of office they took was a commitment to uphold and defend the constitution and not the president, or an immediate superior. Want to be a good military reporter? Find those officers.’ The same can be said about the decent operatives within the intelligence agencies ...”

“... from Labour to the Greens. Three years later, the Greens gained ten more seats and effectively took control of the council. At the general election held on the same day in 2024, Thangam Debbonaire stood for Labour in Bristol Central. Her old seat, Bristol West, where she had a majority of 28,000, had been abolished due to boundary changes, but much of it ...”

“... of a mental hospital ...’ ‘Paranoia.’ ‘He’s paranoid.’ ‘The student movement took such a paranoid view of Nixon.’ ‘Nixon was a paranoid.’ ‘Don’t be so paranoid.’ ‘You’re so oversensitive, Neve, so paranoid.’ ‘Paranoia’, as a word, has gone far into popular usage. In some ways, astonishingly so, since its place in the ...”

“... of four players. Lou Reed was the songwriter, singer, guitarist and attitudiniser extraordinaire. John Cale, an initiate of the minimalist and dissonant avant-garde under the tutelage of New York composer LaMonte Young, was the band’s violist and played bass guitar. Maureen ‘Mo’ Tucker, a self-taught teenage percussionist, played standing up, without ...”

“... where the expressive word, spoken or written, still seemed paramount – beneficiaries of what John Bayley once called “the inevitable solace that right language brings”. We were all, in varying degrees, sociable yet solitary.’It was a bold assertion. She was not only young, and relatively unproven, but the wrong gender; she was pushed right up ...”

“... A few years later, she also agreed to have a biography written by the historian Michael King, who took the approach of telling a ‘compassionate truth’, defined as ‘a presentation of evidence and conclusions that fulfil the major objectives of biography, but without the revelation of information that would involve the living subject in unwarranted ...”

“... like that. Did I want to get us all chucked in jail? I told her it was for my novel, but she took no notice of this lunatic excuse, and threw my first literary effort into the flames. Undaunted, I went to the public library, and took out a book on how to make a career as a writer. The first sentence went something ...”

“... in what appears to have been an effort to remove witnesses from the scene before the crime took place. Cell phone transmission was interrupted to prevent the circulation of photos and videos. The result, in Israel and the US, has been an astonishingly sanitised war, in which, in a bizarre attempt at ‘balance’, the highly inaccurate rocket attacks ...”

“... in contemporary hen-house design, as if this were House and Garden rather than Farm-Poultry. John Evangelist Walsh has remarked that it was in these stories, published ten years before his first book of poems, that Frost had his first successes in capturing the flavour of real speech, voices which he later insisted poetry couldn’t do without. ‘Write ...”