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“... suggest that even the shock of world war is insufficient to explain such a widespread phenomenon. Christopher Thorne’s The Issue of War is a brave and immensely erudite attempt to consider the effects of the Allied-Japanese war of 1941-1945 on all the societies involved, including New Zealand’s. One point that emerges unquestionably is that the failure of ...”

“... years is to compare the introductions to the first and most recent editions of Edward Jones and Christopher Woodward’s Guide to the Architecture of London. In 1983, they wrote of a city in decline, its population down by about a sixth from its postwar height. ‘London is cleaner and uglier than it was at the beginning of the century; but it is still ...”

“... ask themselves ‘whether there might possibly be some mistake’. The Littlehampton Libels by Christopher Hilliard is a short but dazzling work of microhistory. It uses the story of some poison pen letters in a small town to illuminate wider questions of social life in Britain between the wars, from ordinary people’s experience of the legal system to ...”

“... and on 30 January he tweeted a denunciation of his intelligence chiefs Dan Coats, Gina Haspel and Christopher Wray: they were ‘naive’ for telling the Senate that Iran wasn’t working on a nuclear weapon. Half of Trump’s argument for exiting the agreement Obama signed with Iran in 2015, along with the UK, France, China, Russia and Germany, was that the ...”

“... By the late Seventies an organisation called the Violet Quill had formed, and its members – Christopher Cox, Robert Ferro, Michael Grumley, Andrew Holleran, Felice Picano, Edmund White and George Whitmore, together with the film critic Vito Russo and the editor and academic George Stambolian – began producing books ...”

“... think they can escape by buying into a ‘company town’ such as Olivar, a previously rich and white coastal suburb, the beaches now submerged by rising sea levels, the land and infrastructure owned by a single offshore trust. Others stuff their faces with street drugs such as ‘pyro’, which makes fire-starting feel even better than all other drugs put ...”

“... ingratiating patter of the likes of Rollo Swaveley (the well-known public relations consultant), Christopher Smoothe (Minister of Chance and Speculation), and the Bishop of Twicester, to the more extended self-justifications of social comedy was a natural progression. Nevertheless Frayn was always wedded to print, and to parody. Towards the End of the ...”

“... in her. Things changed in the 20th century. Indeed, the modern age has overturned the assertion of White Kennet, an early 18th-century bishop of Peterborough, that ‘Qu. Elizabeth had a Camden, and King Charles a Clarendon, but poor James I has had I think none but paltry scribblers.’ The rise of the historical novel and the popular biography has produced a ...”

“... I used to go to clandestine meetings in his room in the House, where an ill-assorted group – Christopher Price, David Owen, John Mackintosh, Jack Ashley and myself – drank whisky and talked devaluation. When devaluation finally came, I hoped he would become Chancellor of the Exchequer. When he did not, I hoped – incredible as it seems in retrospect ...”

“... novelist, according to Kenneth Ramchand, is how to handle the ‘language of the master’ – the white predecessor who stands ambivalently as former slave-owner and literary source. Heath’s method is to thin his style to a minimum, owing the least possible debt. At times this is overdone, and the narrative reads as bleakly as statistics or genealogy. Taken ...”

“... siblings’ in the ‘art poem’ of the Romantic period. He writes rather in the way some White House spokespersons speak, and he becomes so entangled in the snares of his subject as to mistake the respective genders of Hero and Leander (‘our Hero’, he writes of Poe’s story ‘The Spectacles’, accepts ‘his proper Leander’). He appears also ...”

“... and a changing spectrum. When Sycorax sees, and when Ariel is later seduced by, the first of the white colonists, their sensuous reactions are fully spontaneous and uninhibited. In the 20th century, Miranda like the rest of Sir Kit’s descendants has a ‘touch of the tarbrush’, of which she is very conscious; moreover, she has the trained eye of a ...”

“... Lodovico’s eerie expression of satisfaction as he contemplates the slaughter at the end of The White Devil: ‘I limned this night piece and it was my best.’ The idea that each person carried death around from birth as a sort of travelling companion, an uncanny, dogging ‘double’, blossoms on the stage into the horrific spectre of the ‘thing, armed ...”

“... has proclaimed a permanent state of war, and had that claim taken seriously by the citizens. Christopher Hitchens has jeeringly said that many American leftists are more afraid of John Ashcroft than they are of Osama bin Laden. I am exactly the sort of person Hitchens has in mind. Ever since the White House rammed the ...”

“... for 1996, then 1998, then spring, summer, autumn and now late December 1999. An interesting white-knuckle ride for the politicians. The line has soaked up, so far, around £3.3 billion, but its apologists (cursing critics as spoil-sports) speak airily of how all major construction projects come in a whisker over budget. Look at the Channel Tunnel, the ...”