“... jobs and exciting new industries’; forging alliances with social media entrepreneurs in the service of ‘21st-century statecraft’; imposing no-fly zones and sanctions that will isolate ‘extremists’ in Arab states; ‘empowering the moderates’ in ‘civil society’ who will bring those states into line with US policy. These conventional ...”

“... Donald’s mother, Elena, now had to address her letters to Germany. As the Austrian postal service no longer existed, letters posted from the new territory of Ostmark (‘Eastern March’) had to use German stamps, and there now being no Austrian currency, these had to be purchased in German Reichspfennige. The stamp issued in April 1938 to celebrate ...”

“... table in 1604 were linked to William Byrd.1 The most powerful, the great Protestant statesman Robert Cecil, earl of Salisbury, was the dedicatee of one of Byrd’s last and most haunting keyboard ensembles of pavan and galliard, so popular that they were still admired and adapted through the centuries when most Tudor music was relegated to the archives.2 ...”

“... him the opportunity to exercise his unstoppable curiosity. (Trained as a fighter pilot on National Service in the early 1950s, he was told that he was best suited to flying at night: in daylight he was too often distracted by the view.) He lectured across the faculties in Cambridge in the late 1960s and the 1970s, sat on several official commissions, and wrote ...”

“... in letters to an elder brother, my grandfather, Basil Hastings, who was medically unfit for active service: 23 June 1915 Dear Basil, we went in the trenches for 24 hours on Monday. It was extremely interesting and exciting. They shelled us a bit and threw a few hand-grenades and hand-mortars. We had one casualty. I was firing at a sniper with a periscopic ...”

“... were widely shared in the 1970s and early 1980s. In February 1974 the head of the home civil service, Sir William Armstrong, suffered a dramatic nervous breakdown in Downing Street, convinced that democracy itself was at stake in the miners’ confrontation with Ted Heath’s government. When Armstrong’s colleague Sir Douglas Allen, the permanent ...”

“... political conservatism (symbolised in the open shop), and thinly-veiled racism, all put to the service of boosterism and oligarchy’. Lummis was an enthusiast for South-West archaeology: indeed the cultural/geographical ascription ‘the South-West’ started with him, as did the museum of that name in Highland Park now under threat from the city’s ...”

“... The claims for expression by lesser people, particularly by those in the dependent position of service, and of course all women, could usually be ignored by those in positions of independence or power. The society so eager to develop intellectually was a very narrow part of the whole. The Scottish school of historians, of whom both Adam Smith and David ...”

“... Afew​ months ago I attended Sunday service at the Chapel of Faith Ministries in the main hall of a primary school in Monrovia, the capital of Liberia. The pastor, Prince Yormie Johnson, became a celebrity of sorts in the early 1990s when he filmed his execution of the country’s president in the first months of what would turn out to be a brutal 14-year civil war ...”

“... of pounds it costs the country in terms of road accidents, premature death, burdens on the health service, family breakdown, suicide, homicide, assault, domestic violence, homelessness and police time. Not to mention all the personal misery. Yet faced by so much destruction and epidemic unhappiness, society displays an amazing degree of alcohol ...”

“... officers were warned about German female agents hiding cameras in their blouses. The Security Service (MI5), on the lookout for spooks in Britain, taught its operatives about the use of lemon juice and semen as secret inks, with talcum powder or perfume as fixatives. The Swedish-born Eva de Bournonville was found to have in her possession cakes of soap ...”

“... of sentiment and inner light. Given the human tendency ‘to conceive of our obligations as a service performed for God’, a community must obey the imperatives of human reason as if these imperatives ‘were the commands of a God who is moral ruler of the world’. Lilla speculates that Kant may not have fully appreciated the opening he created for a ...”

“... Corrections to the dates of subsequent letters are also duly made. One more example: a letter to Robert McAlmon that was mistakenly assigned to 2 May 1921 in the first edition, but is correctly assigned to 22 May in this one. It matters a lot, because it is written on the same paper used in three other letters written between 9 and 22 May; Eliot also used ...”

“... and in the last layers of the cloth that malignant Egyptian had tucked away a communication service of the most awful kind to the address of any man who disturbed him. He should die horribly in the open as a beast dies at the hand of a beast and there should not be enough of him to put into a matchbox, much less a mummy case. Whereat they laughed and of ...”

“... what he thinks, and this affords some assurance that he will do what he says. With 35 years of service – first as mayor of Burlington, Vermont, then as a member of Congress re-elected seven times, and finally as a senator – he entered the presidential contest with more first-hand political experience than Obama or Mrs Clinton had in 2008. Besides, the ...”