“... to France in 1786 and, taking his mother’s name, became a soldier. During the Revolution, he rose through the ranks and was a general at 33. He was a man of commanding presence, great courage and colossal physical strength: it was said that ‘the Black Devil’ could hold four rifles at the end of his outstretched arm, one finger in each barrel. In ...”

“... walls, as in a Wren City church, were juxtaposed with piers cased in timber at the base which then rose into arches without capitals in between – all most irregular. It took years to furnish St Agnes with the wealth of screens and fittings Scott wanted. All Hallows never got that far before funds ran dry. It is often said that the late Victorian ...”

“... Normans and the absolutism of the Stuarts, in the Victorian era the Saxon witenagemot mystically rose again in the form of city council chambers. Civic self-government became a symbol of British identity. ‘On the other side of the Channel, Paris is France, but no such rule applies with us,’ the Birmingham Daily Press ...”

“... legend.’ She also has a mesmeric smile, devouring eyes, a cloud of fair hair and ‘a bosom that rose and fell in a kind of sigh’. It’s hardly surprising that Sandy Arbuthnot falls for this sex goddess of espionage; even Richard Hannay is tempted: ‘I hated her instinctively, hated her intensely, but longed to arouse ...”

“... continues. Eliot’s stock seems at present rather low. The second curve, the curve of adulation, rose steeply until the 1930s, when it flattened out, to be restored to rotundity in the poet’s later years. Perhaps it has now levelled off. The appearance of Valerie Eliot’s edition of The Waste Land in 1971 provided a new context for argument. It was well ...”

“... Las Vegas is the national leader in unplanned growth and unruly sprawl, with a population that rose 83 per cent between 1990 and 2000 (more than any other American city), from roughly 850,000 to 1,560,000 – and that’s not counting undocumented residents and the permanent population of tourists (about 250,000). Davis is best known for his books about ...”

“... barefoot or otherwise. I then went to see K. B. McFarlane. My special subject in Schools was Richard II so I had been to McFarlane’s lectures on the Lollard Knights; I also had a copy of some notes on his 1953 Ford Lectures that was passed down from year to year in Exeter. I knew of his austere reputation and of his reluctance to publish from David ...”

“... The last time was in Paris when we were having supper at Brasserie Bofinger. Bacon and his party rose to leave, whereupon all the waiters gathered in the window to watch the great man depart – something I could never imagine happening in London.14 February. Watch the beginning of A Matter of Life and Death on BBC2, where David Niven, having survived his ...”

“... to a fame that seemed to increase year by year almost regardless of his written efforts. Ellison rose up the celebrity ladder, but had no more secure social basis than he had possessed in his years of poverty. He had nothing, really, that could make him comfortable with the superior things he could do and knew he could do, except to try to do them at a ...”

“... new wave of furious proselytising for atheism (which includes not just Hitchens but people like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett) is just another surrogate religion is a familiar one. It’s what the God-botherers always say about the God-bashers. But in the case of Christopher Hitchens it’s not entirely convincing. The ...”

“... least partly caused by forced collectivisation. But Brezhnev’s memoirs say nothing about it. He rose steadily to become director of the Dzerzhinsky metal plant, encouraging ‘shock workers’ to outdo the production targets set by the Five-Year Plan. Schattenberg defines him in the late 1930s as ‘a rather normal example of the new type of ...”

“... of him at the end of the 1980s was his undoing a decade later. By the time the US negotiator Richard Holbrooke met him days before the bombing began, there was no going back. Holbrooke told Milosevic, ‘It will start very soon after I leave,’ and Milosevic told Holbrooke: ‘There is nothing more I can say.’ The most intriguing aspect of the bombing ...”

“... returned and clicked on the second column. Presently a thing like a solid grey-white cauliflower rose until it was a mountain covering all south Manhattan. This is how we bury you. It was the most open atrocity of all time, a simple demonstration written on the sky which everyone in the world was invited to watch. This is how much we hate you. Six thousand ...”

“... is famous for two things: her intense screen beauty and her many marriages (eight of them, two to Richard Burton). But at least as central to her life were her close and enduring friendships with men, some gay (like Rock Hudson), others heterosexual (like Farrell). Sometimes, Farrell took her to the Polo Lounge in the Beverly Hills Hotel, where she had been ...”

“... In 1979, in a preface to a new edition of Yeats: The Man and the Masks, Richard Ellmann wrote about 46 Palmerston Road in Rathmines in Dublin, where George Yeats lived between her husband’s death in 1939 and her own death almost thirty years later. Mrs Yeats lived, Ellmann wrote, among the dead poet’s papers. ‘There in the bookcases was his working library, often heavily annotated, and in cabinets and file cases were all his manuscripts, arranged with care … She was very good at turning up at once some early draft of a poem or play or prose work, or a letter Yeats had received or written ...”