“... On​ 18 June, the sixth day of Israel’s attack on Iran, David Petraeus gave some unsolicited advice to Donald Trump in an interview with the New York Times. Trump, he said, should deliver an ultimatum to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, ordering him to dismantle Iran’s uranium enrichment programme or face ‘the complete destruction of your country and your regime and your people ...”

“... pace until after the Second World War. Some of the desperation that fuelled his early writings may be thought to have gone out of him once it became obvious that he was not going to die young. Wells’s most famous imaginative device, the time machine, is relevant to this, since the Time Traveller is in effect cheating death by voyaging forward in another ...”

“... very next chapter Marjorie rewards him from beyond the grave with £5000 and the Alfa. Try as he may, Benson can’t avoid falling for Greg as easily as Sadie; nor can he avoid making Marjorie into something a good deal worse than an old bat, a PLOP, or Plucky Old Person. Reading about her past, you realise she was doomed to become one; it is a past filled ...”

“... was done even now. Oliver Tambo corresponded from London. Someone from England – maybe it was David Astor, he was a friend – sent him the Observer. And he had lots of American friends, especially Martin Luther King. It was a terrible thing for us when Martin was killed. Father had a whole collection of Martin’s speeches on tape and he used to play ...”

“... and easy violence: taverns and clubs seething with wit and brilliance from the likes of Johnson, David Garrick, Sir Joshua Reynolds and Edmund Burke, courtly politicians, cheerful whores, fine lords and ladies, down-at-heel actresses, a time of ‘free-flowing claret and sexual anarchy’, as Roger Hutchinson puts it. Strutting and tumbling through it all ...”

“... it all: he became involved in the politics of 1848, made a speech attacking the Court, and in May 1849 appeared on the barricades alongside Bakunin. By chance (again) he escaped being imprisoned and thus avoided a likely death sentence. The rest of Mein Leben describes Wagner’s exile, spent mostly in Switzerland, but with interludes in ...”

“... like Iraq for finding themselves automatically lined up on one side of the Cold War. When in May 1946 it had seemed as if the Canal was to go, the Chief of Staff had drawn up a reproachful inventory of all the Middle East countries, showing everywhere except in the Transjordan the uncertainty and fragility of Britain’s situation. Since the ...”

“... proceedings. The Young Spartans is a history painting – it links him directly with Ingres and David – yet the bodies it shows are adolescent, as surely modern children as the rats who later became his models. It challenges the convention of the well-formed statuesque body as the vehicle for the characters of history. When he painted a carriage at the ...”

“... in their prime, as did the playwright Serumaga, who kept oppositional theatre going under Amin. David Rubadiri, then exiled from Malawi, left for Kenya and is now in Botswana. Okello Oculi, poet and political scientist, is in Nigeria. Not one well-known Ugandan creative writer now lives in the country. The Kenyans whom they mixed with at those heady ...”

“... But division is well recorded in Scots from the early 15th century on. It is possible that Lorimer may have thought of his translation as a step towards establishing what linguists call a grapholect, a national written language which is used, as English is, by speakers of a number of different dialects, though no one speaker will draw on all of its lexical ...”

“... in the late Forties, which suggests that Fuchs knew her to be mentally unbalanced. Fuchs may have been abnormal in being able to lock his activities into two watertight compartments and to close his mind to the implications of his spying for the colleagues who trusted him and the country that had given him shelter: but no more abnormal than Anthony ...”

“... hall entertainer. Swooping on a vulnerable target, she broke down any Calvinist inhibitions he may have retained, wrecked his marriage (not without assistance from the man himself) and carried him off to Caxton Hall, where she is supposed to have exclaimed afterwards: ‘I’ve done it! I’ve done it!’ Despite being (allegedly) pushed into an Amsterdam ...”

“... believed that the late work was an inspired adaptation to apparently intolerable conditions: It may be safely said that the curious and unique development of the art of pastel that this obstacle compelled him to evolve would not have come into being but for his affliction. A large scale became a necessity. For the shiny medium of oil paint was substituted ...”

“... for in the family, and which her family so signally fails to develop in her. Be that as it may, she contrives to take an overview of her life across the years without losing a sense of the oddness, partiality and contingency of its shape. One striking example of this is her account of the (de) forming of her sexual life because of an infantile ...”

“... Melbourne spent two winters in Glasgow, living plainly and studying with John Millar, disciple of David Hume and Adam Smith, and one of the most influential proselytisers for the Scottish Enlightenment. This experience gave him a strong commitment to the principles of political economy; it also profoundly influenced his thinking on the relationship between ...”