“... was losing the war to prolong colonial rule and the US was making preparations to assume the white man’s burden. Lansdale’s influence over the government in Saigon and his forays into rural backwaters made him a legendary figure: he is said to be the model for the idealistic if naive spy in Graham Greene’s The Quiet American and in William Lederer ...”

“... Coates’s Isokon building. It was also in Camden in the late 1960s and early 1970s that this white-walled, abstract, often low-rise high modernism was emulated in social housing, in extraordinary projects such as Alexandra Road or Highgate New Town. This was the first part of the capital – and the country in general – to open itself up to the new ...”

“... The killing was the high point of Obama’s first term, and a major factor in his re-election. The White House still maintains that the mission was an all-American affair, and that the senior generals of Pakistan’s army and Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) were not told of the raid in advance. This is false, as are many other elements of the Obama ...”

“... the number of pests, so far kept in check, was about to reach a critical level: leafhoppers, white flies, various caterpillars, red mites, leaf blight and fungi crippled and killed many of the trees. Expensive fumigation followed; in the end, the company was reduced to picking insects off the trees by hand. The search for pest-resistant stock was ...”

“... powers continued to enjoy over Africa. On Césaire’s death in 2008, the Martinican novelist Patrick Chamoiseau admitted that he ‘never understood why the author of these writings, which had liberated so many warriors in Africa, was not for the independence of Martinique’.Crucially, Césaire and Senghor started out as poets rather than ...”

“... what it is rather than using the word unglossed. I could find igloowik only in two places: Patrick William Browne’s 1909 history of Labrador and the 1933 Supplement. In ‘deleting’ these items (‘dropping’ might be nearer the mark), was Burchfield banishing words that had earned a rightful place in the OED or was he simply removing ones that ...”

“... and never wanted to see another book after that.’ All I can say is, he deserved his black and white tiles. He has both autonomy and tact. His translation is full of character, marvellously pointed but in touch with timelessness, relished but without striving for effect. We are in the world of Briggflatts, of ...”

“... milieu which nourished this remarkable writer. For instance, Bold mentions that MacDiarmid knew Patrick Geddes, the Edinburgh polymath and pioneer of modern town planning. But no attention is paid to MacDiarmid’s own suggestion that Geddes’s literary magazine the Evergreen inspired the Scottish Chapbook. In the 1890s Geddes had espoused a Scots ...”

“... William Morris’s Middle Ages, it offered if not an innocent then a simpler world, ‘small and white and clean’, the sort of other Eden with which the English and at times the Scots have consoled themselves ever since they became too powerful as nations to be quite easy in their minds. David’s reputation grew steadily from 1950 and she used her initial ...”

“... a post which brought more prestige than income. Like Tennyson’s despondent father, or the fiery Patrick Brontë, Gabriele Rossetti was a displaced figure. His thwarted ambitions shadowed and deepened the lives of his children. All four took it for granted that they would not be ordinary. It was the children’s responsibility to justify their father’s ...”

“... Wills calls this ‘Bomb Power’ and claims that it has excited fantasies of omnipotence in the White House and reduced Congress to a spectator. Among the public, it fosters a cult, elevating the president from commander in chief of the military to commander in chief of the nation, enjoining all American citizens to spring smartly to attention and ...”

“... vast crowds of hideous people thronging the streets and bus queues.’ There’s an old-fashioned, white-gloved, Bowes-Lyon kind of superiority to all this, and reading Gielgud’s letters makes you realise how theatrical the business of class often is in this country. It is of course perfectly English to hate people at bus stops, but also English to ...”

“... wasn’t in the intellectual league of Cambridge’s Ernest Rutherford or Manchester’s Patrick Blackett or London’s J.D. Bernal, but he had certain virtues that made him ideal for the position of Churchill’s personal scientist. He was posh, rich, well mannered, well connected and Tory – and that wasn’t typical of the British scientific ...”

“... in Paris. Balzac has tremendous fun describing the man. First his clothes: he is wearing ‘a white waistcoat embroidered with gold’ and ‘a shirt-frill of English lace, yellow with age, the magnificence of which a queen might have envied’. Then the face: ‘That dark face was full of angles and furrowed deep in every direction; the chin was ...”

“... sublime emotions. In her Original Sonnets on Various Subjects (1799), Anna Seward quoted a ‘Mr White’ from the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1786 who said ‘the style of the sonnet should be nervous, and, where the subject will with propriety bear elevation, sublime.’ Mary Robinson (described by Coleridge as ‘a woman of undoubted genius’, but perhaps ...”