“... lifelong curiosity about Eastern literatures and languages, which began with the Bible and soon took him to Islam’s sacred scriptures. The West-Eastern Divan, which he began between 1814 and 1815, is a long, elaborate lyric cycle which draws on Persian and Arabic verse forms, themes and imagery, and sings fervent praises to Oriental attitudes towards ...”

“... in Bernard over these years,’ Williams concluded long after the fact. In 1970 Bernard left; it took Shirley ten years to get an annulment. She lived through the 1970s largely on her own. She had eclipsed Castle as Labour’s most prominent woman, but she had no one at home to praise her or, as Labour’s fratricidal wars began, help her find her ...”

“... When an ailing John Maynard Keynes travelled to the American South in March 1946, he was delighted by what he found. The ‘balmy air and bright azalean colour’ of Savannah offered a welcome reprieve from the cold and damp of London, he wrote on arriving, and the children in the streets were livelier company than the ‘irritable’ and ‘exceedingly tired’ citizens of postwar Britain ...”

“... one of the owners. That might explain why he had so much time for the Glazer brothers after they took over the business in 2005 and loaded it up with debt, outraging many supporters who thought their club was being turned into a private cash cow. A group of them called on Ferguson to resign to show his solidarity with the ordinary fans who were being ...”

“... once those interventions were well underway, not before, that the London attacks of 7 July 2005 took place. It doesn’t make sense for Cameron to argue that air attacks on Raqqa will help prevent IS attacks on London, when the recent attacks in Paris happened 14 months into an intensive series of air raids on and around IS-held areas, led by the world’s ...”

“... Hearing the news on the Today programme this morning R. nearly cries. I met Bowie only once, at John Schlesinger’s sometime in the 1980s, and remember him as a slight, almost colourless figure, who was somehow Scots. M. calls later and recalls how someone he knew picked up Bowie when he was still David Jones. He offered to come round, bringing his guitar ...”

“... who, having served a prison sentence for armed robbery, decided his fighting days were over and took a job in the Sinn Féin press office. O’Rawe still believed that the political campaign was a way of winning broader support for the IRA’s military effort. But looking back he believes that, all the while, Adams was intent on the political struggle ...”

“... like all children in this type of situation, I think – to protect him, resuscitate him.’ He took a job as the deputy headmaster of a secondary school in Orléans, and the family moved into a staff apartment. When she had nothing to do at the weekends, Serre roamed the empty school and wrote a book – in part, she says, to seduce her philosophy ...”

“... readerships. Thus Ascherson joins the oddly-assorted, lively company of Primo Levi, Oliver Sacks, John Berger, Edward Said and Germaine Greer – but from a slippery starting-point: the journalist is a specialist in nothing. Sometimes he seems to know that only too well, and to underrate his own contribution. Calling for work on the growing power of an ...”

“... Europeans on the subject of the American Far West. One of these was deemed so important that Lewis took it with him on the expedition. This was The History of Louisiana – a natural history and topography of the Louisiana Purchase, the better part of what is now the Middle and Far West of the United States – by the French engineer, Antoine Le Page du ...”

“... of letters, when he read his son’s earlier novels; Arthur Waugh, not unlike Isaac D’Israeli, took a quizzical view of his son’s upper-class fantasies.) Brideshead Revisited (hence its appeal to the Americans) is not a picture of what the world is like: rather, a carefully painted canvas of what Waugh would like the world to be like. Again, like ...”

“... The Guineans gawped at such efforts (which they would never have dreamt of making themselves), but took the fact of competition in their stride. There was even a period when Mongolia entered the fray, claiming their country to be the perfect model of how to modernise a nomadic, non-Christian, cattle-based society. Similar bizarre competitions flowered in other ...”

“... His books appear to be conceived on the principle laid down by Dr Greenslade at the beginning of John Buchan’s The Three Hostages, as the proper way to write a ‘shocker’: ‘The author writes the story inductively, and the reader follows it deductively ... I begin by fixing on one or two facts which have no obvious connection ... imagine anything you ...”

“... is so convincingly specified that it explains the development of others whose treachery took a different form and was therefore known by a different name, if indeed it was classified at all: Bran well Brontë, for example, who had inspired in me nothing but a passing irritation before, but who, I came to think, had so much in common with William ...”

“... an element of explanation to the problem of why it was in England that the Industrial Revolution took place. Clearly pre-industrial England had a relatively rich and sophisticated economy in which the market element was strong enough to cope with basic harvest fluctuations, and which developed a system of public aid capable of carrying the population through ...”