“... up in wine-coloured trousers plus checked shirt and bow tie, this gangling provincial seemed to be projecting himself as some kind of dandy aesthete: ‘a little ridiculous in appearance, anyway outlandish, unlikely, on one’s hasty summing up, to be attractive to girls’. Amis would soon enough experience a change of ...”

“... Thames and the Humber – made it possible for each of the more mountainous parts of the island to be isolated by invaders and guarded by them. When they lost the towns and forts commanding these estuaries, the resident Celts were pushed back into their mountain fastnesses. The inhabitants ...”

“... chose to do it on the leaf of a richly illuminated prayer book. Anne replied on another leaf: ‘By daily proof you shall me find/To be to you both loving and kind.’ This was written below a miniature of the Annunciation. If we find the reference to the expectant Virgin tasteless, even blasphemous, we are missing the ...”

“... Mosul, said by some to be modern Iraq’s second and by others its third most populous city, was originally awarded to France as part of Syria under the infamous Sykes-Picot Agreement. François Georges-Picot, the French delegate at the secret negotiations that divided the Ottoman Empire into British, French and Russian satrapies, laid out France’s dubious claim to Mosul and the area around it ...”

“... 25 years ago, when Valentino Achak Deng was six years old, his village in Southern Sudan was razed by the murahaleen, paramilitaries working for the government in Khartoum to suppress the Sudan People’s Liberation Army. Achak was separated from his family and driven from his home; he was lucky not to have been killed. The people of Marial Bai, like the ...”

“... to show for it, and it isn’t surprising that some of those students felt there was more to be said. Sisman hadn’t even read all the books, Kathleen Burk protested – and he certainly hadn’t footnoted properly. Her own account, published in 2000, could not be faulted on those grounds. Burk didn’t neglect the ...”

“... attacked liberalism as their greatest enemy. In our own time liberal democracies have been crushed by such extremists. Against any encouragement of this tendency in our own country, intentional or not, we feel obliged to speak out.’ The advertisement was signed by 63 prominent intellectuals, writers and businessmen: among ...”

“... The desire to atone for the failings of an earlier generation sees historical analysis driven by contemporary moral certainties. Something of this sort animates Brian Girvin’s study of the diplomacy between the Allies and Ireland, Girvin’s late father having been pro-German, as he reveals in an early footnote. The dispute is enhanced ...”

“... design an exuberant building that delights some and outrages others: a glass box supported by a superstructure of steel and concrete, each façade a playful grid of prefabricated columns and diagonal braces, with a transparent escalator tube that snakes up the front, and other service tubes, picked out in primary colours, that run up the other ...”

“... The classic narrative begins with the court battles and grassroots protests against Jim Crow. By the end of the 19th century, the Southern states had implemented a system of nearly complete racial separation in the public sphere. Blacks and whites attended segregated schools. On streetcars, buses and trains, ‘coloured’ travellers sat separately and ...”

“... both McLeod’s voice and McGahern’s are recognisably inflected, in certain patterned stresses, by a common Gaelic linguistic inheritance. MacLeod needs McGahern to introduce him because, unlike McGahern, he was, until recently, still a writer with a small, loyal following at home, rather than an international reputation. In thirty years he has produced two ...”

“... has a towering place. The division of the country, in 1655, into 12 districts administered by killjoy Puritan commanders was a brief episode, in effect lasting less than a year, but it has been reviled and derided from that time to this. In the 18th and 19th centuries, as constitutionalism grew, the reign of the Major-Generals came to ...”

“... If you are willing to define what you mean by it, the idea of progress in the arts is useful. Take Titian’s portraits. Whether or not those who first saw them understood that a new way of recording likeness was evolving, that way would define the technical ambitions of European portrait painting until photography put an end to them ...”

“... this fuss about cooks and chefs? The how-to-cook sections of bookshops are as big as the how-to-be-successful-in-life sections; it’s no longer clear where one ends and the other begins. Many of the books sell themselves not so much as sources of practical information – how to make a wild mushroom risotto – but as windows onto both the skills and the ...”

“... each time. But Moore now commanded great respect in the black community, and many were shocked by his arrest. A giant man, heavy, broad and tall, he appeared imperturbable and unimpeachable – and yet he was Coleman’s prize, the alleged kingpin of Tulia’s drug trade. Another of those arrested was Donnie Smith. Charismatic, a former star athlete, he ...”