“... was faking messages from missing British liaison officers to keep up morale at home. SOE personnel may not have perfected their skills in duplicity – ‘love and kisses’ – but they were giving it their best shot. Shortly, secret services on both sides of the Iron Curtain would hone the arts of lying. Thompson died in early June, but it wasn’t until 21 ...”

“... was one thing, taste quite another: ‘According to the disposition of the organs, the same object may be both sweet and bitter; and the proverb has justly determined it to be fruitless to dispute concerning tastes.’ This is a rare instance, Hume noted, of proverbial common sense agreeing with philosophy. I like the Château Talbot 1983; you like Wynn’s ...”

“... in explaining why torture or other such abuse is bad in principle. The felicific calculus may well favour lynching an innocent man, if a crazed mob is gagging for it: indeed, the utilitarian grounds for pandering to the crowd strengthen as its bloodlust grows more fierce. Nor does it get us very far to be told that torture is wrong, as some ...”

“... once the balloon went up,’ he began to take preventative measures with an anti-tank rifle (they may have been the only shots Watt fired ‘in action’). The troops under his command objected to such summary treatment being meted out to the zoo’s two zebras; they were released and followed the retreating soldiers ‘at a wary distance’. One of the ...”

“... work. The contract – agreed without any competitive tendering – was signed in early May but, unusually, backdated to 17 March, two days before Lee Cain’s Zoom call. Paul Stephenson’s public relations firm, Hanbury Strategy, was given a series of contracts. Campaigners launched a legal action, accusing the Cabinet Office of apparent bias and ...”

“... from the various thens and elsewheres her wounded memory dredges up.Male readers (in particular) may be startled by the way Rosa’s experience of sexual assault acquires the status of countersubject. It is somehow communicable, unlike her experiences with her brother, even potentially an agent of bonding:Unspoken, not hidden, a nod reallythe night we both ...”

“... of welcome, in which a host invites you in with greetings, smiles and open arms. The gestures may be a sincere expression of friendship, but they are also, unavoidably, a sly assertion of privilege: this is my place, they say, and even if I tell you to ‘make yourself at home,’ you must remember that you are here on my sufferance. The double-edged ...”

“... woollen coat,’ he writes, ‘which covers the day labourer, as coarse and rough as it may appear, is the produce of the joint labour of a great multitude of workmen.’ He listed the shepherds, wool sorters, carders, dyers, spinners, weavers, fullers and dressers who ‘must all join their different arts in order to complete even this homely ...”

“... which he believed his due. For him there was only the bitterness of the dishonoured prophet.’ He may be roughly right if ‘impact’ is measured in terms of immediate practical consequences, but his insistence that the book was widely derided by supporters of the Revolution, and did not cut much ice with the political Right, whether in England or ...”

“... any reason, moral or political, but only by positive law ... Whatever inconveniences, therefore, may follow from the decision, I cannot say this case is allowed or approved by the laws of England; and therefore the black must be discharged.’ Although the decision had been long anticipated by that of Holt, history – encouraged by a strong abolitionist ...”

“... shows little difference in method from the principle of observation in the Diary itself, and this may have been deliberate policy on her part. She would write as she observed, and in the first plan for The Years, to be called ‘The Pargiters’, she envisaged something ‘leading naturally on to the next stage, the essay-novel’. That is what all her novels ...”

“... public seems more aware of. A similar moral seemed to emerge from Jake’s Thing (1978), which you may reasonably regard as Amis’s best novel if you have not yet read Stanley and the Women. Jake is conned by the Zeitgeist into thinking his middle-aged impotence a disability, and undergoes a series of humiliating public treatments for it, until he comes to ...”

“... are two problems with these accounts. First, the test of Orange Herald was held on Friday, 31 May: it would not have been physically possible for the story to appear before the following Monday. In other words, the journalists wrote their stories in advance of the test, on the basis of a briefing from Brigadier Jehu, who had seen the first test – Short ...”

“... investing something that might be called Life or Experience – it is a species of risk. Interest may or may not accrue; but art, James intimates, is a version of stocks and shares; the market fluctuates. Something is transformed – work is done on it – in the service of making interest, sustaining curiosity, keeping ...”

“... of the Party. Kelly, who was sentenced to life imprisonment after the 1973 Old Bailey bombing, may or may not be a member of the IRA army council, but he is certainly a member of Sinn Fein: he stood unsuccessfully at last year’s Árd Fheis, or party conference, for election to the Árd Chomhairle – the Party’s ...”