“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... him with the Southern bloc in the Senate, which had been blocking civil rights legislation for more than fifty years. Johnson had always supported his fellow Southern senators in refusing to back anti-lynching legislation, claiming it was a matter for the individual states. This was the price he paid for getting them to do his bidding when he needed ...”

“... cantankerous the world of literature is, and how smarmy, both backbiting and back-scratching much more so than the theatre or show business generally. I’m sure this is because actors don’t moonlight as critics in the way novelists or writers do. Few writers are reviewers tout court, most having other jobs as novelists, historians, biographers or ...”

“... MacArthur; almost all of us, it seems, would rather forget him. Except writers. There have been more than a dozen biographies of MacArthur. Part of the fascination is his contradictoriness: could the same MacArthur really have been a military genius, a colossal blunderer, a proto-Fascist and a world-class charlatan? Another attraction is the record-setting ...”

“... were bussed straight to the consulate, where they were offered sandwiches, tea, cigarettes and more forms to fill in. My uncle Peter thinks they were then put up for a couple of weeks in the Pera Palace Hotel, established in 1895 by the Wagons-Lits Company as the unofficial terminus for the Orient Express. Then they moved into a flat somewhere nearby. It ...”

“... the trilby in his hands. ‘Anyway,’ says Mr Parr kindly but with what the three of us know is more tact than truth, ‘depression isn’t really mental illness. I see it all the time.’ Mr Parr sees it all the time because he is the Mental Health Welfare Officer for the Craven district and late this September evening in 1966 Dad and I are sitting in his ...”

“... riverpath from mouth to source. My bias, which I will attempt to overcome, tends towards the more cynical view ascribed to William Burroughs by Jack Kerouac. ‘When you start separating the people from their rivers what have you got? Bureaucracy!’ Having triumphantly ghosted London’s autobiography, Ackroyd’s obvious follow-up was the ...”