“... the story to Agence-France Presse. General Samih Batikhi, head of the GID, insisted that nothing more than a fight between locals and tourists had taken place; another official suggested that Mishal’s driver had sparked the row by making unwelcome advances to the Canadians. The absence of a weapon wasn’t the only reason the Jordanians were sceptical. Why ...”

“... the departure gate: there was going to be a delay. I hadn’t looked at the book in front of me in more than thirty years – Norman Mailer’s Miami and the Siege of Chicago, his two convention pieces from 1968 – and just as my phone began to buzz my eye landed on a sentence: ‘The reporter was a literary man – symbol had the power to push him into ...”

“... Chichester, visits by Samuel Pepys, location work for the latest Jane Austen or for Harrison Ford (more bombs) in Patriot Games – are trumpeted, while the dark history of the Greenwich marshes, a decayed industrial wilderness, is brutally elided. The tongue of poisoned land, a couple of miles to the east of the Royal Naval College (film set, banqueting hall ...”

“... of contemplating a man whom Gottlieb admires to the point of worship – Great Expectations is more intriguing than many weightier accounts, perhaps because it allows us to observe, as we might not in a long and dense biography, certain patterns of behaviour, certain obsessions, that we soon realise are absolutely central not only to the plots of ...”

“... his poem for its 1729 ‘Variorum’ edition those profuse helpful footnotes which make the text more confusing than before. Pope glosses, for instance, the first occurrence of the name of the poem’s first hero, called in it ‘Tibbald’ though we would now write the name of the Shakespearian scholar in question ‘Theobald’; and the poet’s note ...”

“... in Cambridge, dictated his will. He was to be buried alongside a former master of the college, Thomas Legge, who had died twenty years earlier. Gostlin had commissioned a memorial to his friend which you can see on the south wall of the college chapel. Legge kneels in prayer. Beneath him hands clutch at a blazing heart. ‘Love joined them while they ...”

“... could please approve the following payments for my number one military contact which are paid via Thomas Cook. Your email okaying them is all the paperwork necessary. The stories are: Recruit speared by drill sergeant – £3000 Drunken Sandhurst instructor sacked – £1000 Woman squaddie killed in Iraq – £500 ‘Of course,’ Brooks had ...”

“... that lasted 44 days. Both sides used tanks, artillery, rockets, drones and cluster ammunition. More than six thousand soldiers were killed and thousands more injured, along with scores of civilian casualties. Azerbaijan reversed its defeats of the first war and recaptured the seven provinces that Armenia had ...”

“... long blue work shirt over pink, is lean, of modest height, and steady as a post. The dog is more enthusiastic, a superior hillbilly poodle. It bounds forward to lick the passenger window, avid for society. As the man is not: he can take it when it comes, assess a situation, shape unshapely events to a predetermined programme and deliver what’s ...”

“... go-slows at roundabouts, motorway tolls and intersections. It was a triumph; they were ready for more. On their Facebook pages they began referring to 17 November as ‘Act I’. I’d already been stopped that morning at a roundabout not far from where I live in south-west France. A small group of gilets jaunes were blocking the road, complaining first ...”

“... collating, naming, laying things out. It was very neat, this mind, good at networking and sorting; more talks, more sponsors, more slots on the grid. And a Reception with chamber music at the beginning and a Party with cheap beer at the end, and Satellite meetings in other cities before ...”

“... facts of life and is duped into exercising his conjugal duties; followed by a bed-switch involving more dupery (taken from Philippe de Laon’s One Hundred New Tales); followed by a moralité about a vengeful wife who murders and dismembers her husband (by François de Rosset). A more refined example of romance (a cloudy ...”

“... Sonnets as poems. Putting the intellectual and expository to one side, Vendler says that she is more concerned with the aesthetic experience we’encounter ‘temporally’ as we read the sonnet. We encounter that experience in a particularly structured way, because, as she marvellously shows, each sonnet has what she terms a ‘couplet tie’ – the words ...”

“... littered on the slopes; mortal illness, and near miraculous recovery; heroism, heartache, more heroism and more heartache, all of it against a revolving backdrop of political turmoil and cultural revolution. If this handsome hunk of a biography is at times exhausting and exasperating, it’s partly because she ...”

“... patriot of British institutions, a superficial glance might lead one to think he was latterly more regarded in the United States. His last book, The Voice of Liberal Learning, was edited from Colorado. The first posthumous collection, an enlarged version of Rationalism in Politics, now appears from Indianopolis. The only extended survey of his work is a ...”