“... right to the end. The end came on 19 July 1979 when the Frente Sandinista de Liberacion Nacional took over the government of Nicaragua. The class struggle nonetheless continues – but where? Obviously, in military clashes with the counter-revolutionary and Honduran forces trained and financed by the US Government. But what of the internal front? In the ...”

“... and then, without bothering to consult the operational War Diaries, proceeds to spin out the John Connell-Correlli Barnett myth that Montgomery’s only contribution to the Desert arena was an incomprehensible uplift in morale. Monty’s plan for the defence of Alam Halfa, he declares, was inherited from Auchinleck: he neglects to mention that ...”

“... of his family. With the father soon arrested and executed (hence the lad’s nickname, ‘They took him’), the mother goes off with a knife-grinder, leaving JLP to be brought up by his grandmother and to turn into a juvenile delinquent. His pilferings and tricks lead to an encounter with a peasant landowner, Master Sestier, through whose local influence ...”

“... we know little about Blunt’s inner torments, if any). Burgess, Maclean and Philby all took to drink in the most satisfactorily Victorian way, Maclean driven to the verge of madness by Presbyterian guilt. As for Marx, he was ‘inhuman’ and wrote ‘turgid tomes’; even Donald Maclean’s book British Foreign Policy after Suez, written after his ...”

“... to lodge a protest with the school, so sure was she that Joe was better at everything. The key to John Kennedy’s character lay essentially in acute maternal deprivation – and in the contrast between his cold, prudish mother and his overwhelming, earthy father. His mother could not bear to kiss or even touch her children (except to beat them), left them ...”

“... uses every available one to allow us to glimpse a life of companionship of the kind to which John Milton aspired in a scholar’s marriage: his wife’s chamber was placed next to his study in the house which he most frequently occupied, ‘a proximity’, MacCulloch says, ‘which not all scholars have welcomed in their ...”

“... demise seemed in keeping with this general impression of hopelessness. ‘I cannot say his death took me altogether by surprise,’ Arnold confided to a friend. ‘I had long a foreboding something was deeply wrong with him.’Though his biographers have never been able to decide whether Clough was an utterly singular or thoroughly representative figure (Mr ...”

“... must put a ban on the Jews.’ Marcus found himself friendless; his grades plummeted; he took out his bitterness in a student paper called the Saturday Evening Pest. ‘The whole institution is a lie,’ he wrote of Yale, ‘and serves as a cloak of respectability for a social and athletic club.’ After two years, he dropped out, moved to ...”

“... clarity of seeing, an acknowledgment that this is what painting is. Just as the young John Richardson, visiting Braque’s studio for the first time, felt that he had arrived ‘at the very heart of painting’. But these apparently quiet artists often turn out to have been more far-sighted and more radical than we assume. Corot, for example, once ...”

“... did not appear until 1837 and was quickly supplanted by two popularising and very popular works, John Forster’s The Life and Adventures of Oliver Goldsmith (1848) and Washington Irving’s Life of Oliver Goldsmith (1849). Forster and Irving built on Prior’s research to reinstate – affectionately, but still damagingly – the simple, unworldly ...”

“... mine. For love and family in her case; in mine, improbably and occasionally grimly, for work. It took me a while to get used to G, as I’d like coyly to go on calling it. I started off part-time. Like Persephone, one term in two. I bought a lady’s bicycle and slept on a colleague’s Vietnam-era camp-bed in a short-let plywood apartment (‘it’s called ...”

“... he was also strongly partisan; on occasions, he came close to ‘going native’, in the manner of John Reed with the Red Guards in Petrograd. His journalism always threatened to tip over into a more direct, military involvement – until he finally became, and died, a soldier. A South African born into a liberal, newspaper-owning family in the Eastern ...”

“... our knowledge of Nature is always socially mediated. This is one of several issues which divide John Rees, who has written an erudite, illuminating introduction to this book, and Slavoj Žižek, who has provided a characteristically provocative ‘postface’ for it. Roughly speaking, Rees seeks rather stiffly to reclaim Lukács for a certain Marxist ...”

“... the Cravens ‘were our near neighbours, and old acquaintances, and they were gentlemen.’ She took the name of Wilson (quite why is still not clear) and from then on life was a succession of lovers. At least, according to Wilson it was a succession: her biographer more plausibly suggests a certain amount of overlap. She was not, as Woolf wrote, ‘always ...”

“... design and the stylisation of animals and vegetation this need not mean that their patrons took any interest in Byzantine floor plans. As an exemplary archival historian, Schulz is especially alert to what was not documented. Inventories never mention the storage of boats and boating equipment on the ground floor, yet on his visits to palaces he is ...”