“... my father, the Chinese Maritime Customs. But this work, much of it from the distinguished hand of John Fairbank, was mostly concerned with the 19th-century origins of the institution, shedding less light on modern times. For its more recent history, it was not even very clear where the records lay: the best contemporary guide to Chinese archives, produced in ...”

“... affiliations remain concealed. The arrival of Hugo Young at the Guardian was part of a swop that took Peter Jenkins to the Sunday Times. Much respected for intelligence and integrity, Peter Jenkins ought to be our most influential political commentator. But there has been a more tentative and less radical thrust to his column than used to be the case and an ...”

“... thought of joint task forces, they even tended accidentally to act in concert. The adventure that took America’s marines ‘to the shores of Tripoli’ was an expedition against Mediterranean pirates that anticipated both countries’ later efforts to clear pirates from the South China seas, and President Reagan’s strike on Tripoli in 1986. When in the ...”

“... public perfomances as a musician. Literature, even more than music, was an art which the Romans took seriously, and about which we know quite a lot: its absence is a shortcoming in an account of the Roman world. Although their work has the subtitle ‘Economy, Society and Culture’ – ‘Culture’ being the title of their tenth, last and weakest chapter ...”

“... Eliot in the Houghton Library; Tennyson’s In Memoriam; Lyndall Gordon’s Eliot’s Early Years; John Mayer’s T.S. Eliot’s Silent Voices; Laforgue’s Hamlet, Mélanges posthumes, Le Concile féerique, and ‘Esthét-ique’; Symons’s The Symbolist Movement in Literature; Maeterlinck’s essay ‘Silence’; Boswell’s Johnson; the OED; Paradise ...”

“... the ‘politics of mana’ which characterised the aggressive competitiveness of iwi culture, they took initiatives in greeting the new forces brought by the Europeans and appropriating them to their own perceived needs. They took to farming, trading, gunpowder and literacy, including Biblical Christianity; they set up an ...”

“... and always looked smart; as Grant recalled, she ‘tried to smother me with care’. Both parents took him to the cinema. With his mother, Archie went to the genteel Claire Street Picture House (romances, melodramas and tea on the balcony); with his father he went to the brash, barn-like Metropole (slapstick, bad piano-playing and lots of men smoking). Archie ...”

“... winding round the other, each in itself interesting to follow: the investigative routine, ‘Who took the child, and where, and how, and why, and for whose benefit?’ and the psychological question, ‘What sort of people are these, whose lives have interacted, whose failures meet in the crisis of this moment?’ The sort of people who surround Davy, and ...”

“... women tried to look down and away and sideways. Women were among the sights that flâneurs took in as they slid through the crowds on the streets, but to look boldly in return was to designate oneself a woman of ill repute. The gazes which whizzed about and knocked and glanced against each other in the streets of Paris were an imaginative nexus from ...”

“... then, impressed. In retrospect, it was only a matter of time before the Devil’s Arch Advocate took on Faith itself. The book he has produced is clever, subtle and well-written, in an economical summary style. This much I expected, but I also found it, despite the archness, curiously affecting, highly serious and strangely profound. You quickly ...”

“... is the spur stood on its head). But many prime ministers have fared less well: Chatham and Lord John Russell because there are few private papers; Gladstone and Salisbury because their careers were too long for any one writer to encompass comprehensively; Charles James Fox and Lloyd George because their passion to rule and their ruling passions are so hard ...”

“... status of the ‘head of the respondent’s family’ and no less than 8 per cent of the sample took this to refer to the respondent’s mother. Even so, says Halsey, ‘the data have been organised so that ... these variables are all labelled as characteristics of their non-existent father’! If subjective phenomena such as social-class identity are to be ...”

“... that English literature had already been taking up the swelling theme of empire – a new book by John McVeagh has much to say about this. ‘How can one write the history of the English-speaking peoples and their empires?’ – a large question on which Calder must have long deliberated before striking out his path. There has been discussion lately as to ...”

“... it must be said, from accepting the advice of businessmen and bankers. Depression and recovery took place against the background of a monotonous litany, familiar now to British ears, intoned by the world of big business: that wages and social security costs were too high, that the law should be changed to ‘de-bureaucratise’ the labour contract, that ...”

“... and only four months after US troops had arrived in the southern half of Korea. Few in the West took the trouble then to find out about the nature of the Korean revolution. Few were even honest enough to acknowledge that it existed. And almost no one in the West has conceded that this is what the Korean War of 1950-53 – a civil war delayed by outside ...”