“... improved prisons, built libraries, decisively challenged the slave trade. But work of this order took off from a base of peculiar narrowness: a hostility to civilised manifestations of art and intellect, and a linked withdrawal from many other kinds of commitment to this world. In A Gathered Church (1978), a work that has considerable respect for Puritan ...”

“... office in Clare Street where the family quantity surveying business was run. In December 1931, he took in Perugino’s Pietà, newly acquired by the gallery. ‘It’s buried behind a formidable barrage of shining glass, so that one is obliged to take cognisance of it progressively, square inch by square inch. It’s all messed up by restorers,’ he ...”

“... were four gommoni on the water, within minutes of the Italian beaches. The lieutenant at the helm took his speed up to about 45 knots, flipping the boat over the waves. Garbled co-ordinates, crumbling with static, came through from the base radio. After a surge of movement that brought us within a kilometre of the coast, we slowed up and hung in the ...”

“... conviction about the European Community was complete, his experience of it was negligible. When he took office as President in 1977, unlike most United Kingdom ministers he had conducted no business in the Councils or with the Commission. From a distance, it was easy to believe that a strong President might run affairs rather like a prime minister, choosing ...”

“... freely as terms of approval and abuse (often in relation to Britain and Hollywood respectively). John Caughie contributes a sharp set of notes on broadcasting and the cinema, among other things tracing the influence of Scottish Presbyterianism on Grierson and Reith. Barr, in another essay in the same vein, points out how radio was seen as socially cohesive ...”

“... of particular institutions in the style of Daniel Arasse’s vivid study of the guillotine or John Bender on the penitentiary, but rather an analysis of ideas which is concerned to trace intellectual continuities over a wide field of documentation. Thus although Wiener talks of ‘images’ and ‘depictions’, there is no discussion of visual ...”

“... more mutually supportive. It was not that the British were unaware of the dangers of this. Sir John Troutbeck, one of the two Ambassadors of the Fifties examined in the chapter by William Roger Louis, was outspokenly crit ical of the immense social gaps, and in his view Western education had only made the younger generation of Iraqis more narrow-minded ...”

“... was looking for a ‘handbook of computer crime’, allegedly being published by the company. It took away every item of computing equipment, printers, disks, tapes that it could find. Highly sensitive information about the E911 system – an extended version of 911, the American equivalent of the 999 emergency number – was found on several hacker ...”

“... Still retain I, troubled, shaken, Mean estate, by him forsaken; And this home, which scarcely took Impress from his little look, By his faring to the Dim Grows all eloquent of him. Many things might be praised in this poem: its technical mastery; the distinctiveness of its diction and use of abstractions; the unexpected reversal which has the owner ...”

“... gave ‘Reform’ MPs a defining political cause and a leader under whom they could rally: Lord John Russell, dubbed by Parry ‘the greatest Liberal statesman of his age’. Over the next forty years, the Whig-Liberal Party developed a distinct set of policies and, more importantly, an idiosyncratic approach to public life. As might have been expected from ...”

“... Hence the comedy (unintentional? it’s hard to say) of juxtapositions like this: To the St John & Elizabeth [hospital]... Mr Mulvany visited me at 7.45. We had a long talk about the problem of materialism in a modern society. He said he would inject the piles tomorrow and look at the inside of the rectum etc. The diaries, then, show Williams to be ...”

“... innocent that he was, he failed to twig that walking through the streets of Harlem with Mayor John Lindsay might be interpreted as supporting the political ambitions of a white politician in need of black votes. Rap Brown ‘lambasted me as a shallow liberal poking his nose into a world he didn’t know and in which he didn’t belong’. Brando ...”

“... and in two of her essays she challenged the veracity of Anastasia Tsvetaeva’s memoirs and took issue with Anna Saakiants about her slanted annotations of Tsvetaeva’s writings. These two women’s vitriolic replies to Kudrova’s charges must have alerted the ideological authorities, because nothing more was heard about Irma Kudrova’s ...”

“... at home and for military defeat abroad. In his compelling biographical and historical study of John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam, Neil Sheehan focuses our attention on this sorry chapter in American foreign affairs. A prize-winning reporter in Saigon for United Press International and the New York Times, Sheehan also won distinction as the journalist ...”

“... uncanny faculty of melting’ had become a meltdown. Plath’s doctor during her final months, Dr John Horder, wrote afterwards: My judgment has always been that this was a very determined attempt to end her life ... I believe ... she was liable to large swings of mood, but so excessive that a doctor inevitably thinks in terms of brain chemistry. This does ...”