“... behind the German lines. He did so in the Special Air Service regiment, newly founded by Colonel David Stirling, and engaged in some lively rough shooting among the enemy encampments. At one point he was very close to Rommel. There was a crack Greek Sacred Squadron and it was the obvious unit to join next. Eventually he saw the shattering of the Mareth Line ...”

“... younger half-brother from his father’s third marriage.Æthelstan’s​ reign is the focus of David Woodman’s excellent new monograph, The First King of England, which posits this period as the crux of England’s formation. Æthelstan’s reign was particularly significant for his takeover of Northumbria. As Stenton noted, this was the first time ‘a ...”

“... old George’ of Poplar had come to personify grassroots Labour in much the same way as David Blunkett of the ‘socialist republic’ of South Yorkshire did in the late 1970s. Shepherd sees Lansbury’s evolution into a Cockney icon as a parable of the working-class boy made good by a conversion to socialism. But some of the photographs which ...”

“... lack of complexity is also the reason he lends himself to popularising accounts like this one. David Bather Woods writes in a deliberately non-intimidating style as he takes the reader through the various stages of Schopenhauer’s uneventful life. He was born in Danzig in 1788 and visited London as a teenager, where he made sure to drop in at the Bedlam ...”

“... facts presented in his account, and in those of pioneering media critics such as Liz Curtis and David Miller, suggest that a more critical verdict would not be out of place.* The early years of broadcasting in Northern Ireland had been safe and somnolent, as Savage describes. After BBC Northern Ireland was established between the wars, its directors quickly ...”

“... spiked by his editor: ‘Your surmises both wild dangerous to President Wilson’s work for just peace.’Disenchanted with newspapers, Hecht moved to New York, where he hoped to become a real writer rather than a newspaperman. In his introduction to the new edition of A Child of the Century, David Denby compares him with ...”

“... was teasingly fond, or any of her other and more handsome suitors, she lived for a long time in peace and prosperity, governed her kingdom well, repelled its enemies and won the hearts and praise of most of her subjects. She has never really died. This is at once the stuff of fairytale, and it is not. Certainly no social worker today could be blamed for ...”

“... to extol the heroism and patriotism of their soldiers and peasants. The spirit of War and Peace still hovers over them. Western accounts are more sober, and tend to see things from the French point of view, thanks to the massive amount of available French documentation. They emphasise Napoleon’s mistakes, the effects of winter and the travails of ...”

“... out of fear, even at the risk of nuclear war, and never fear to negotiate, even at the risk of peace. The Cuban Missile Crisis and the Test Ban Treaty were twin feats of a single charisma. A thousand days later the President was dead in Dallas: the myth of Camelot had the martyrdom which would make it the American legend of our times. The atmosphere of ...”

“... of torture in Waiting for the Barbarians (1980). When, at the emotional climax of Disgrace (1999), David Lurie embraces his daughter to comfort her following her gang rape by three men, she is described as ‘stiff as a pole’. Long after she knows his name, Beatriz insists on thinking of Witold as ‘the Pole’: it’s one of the ways she has of keeping him ...”

“... with ... is old and decrepit and should go at once ... should be sent away to end his life in peace ... is quite unfit to be a Major-General ... is far too old and quite unfit to command ... is idle and has taken to drink ... is completely and utterly useless’. Sustained by treasure-trove of this sort, the reader will persist to the end. But he will ...”

“... pursuit of wealth and power. Though Eden forfeited his premiership, his physical wellbeing and his peace of mind as a result of Suez, the one thing he did not sacrifice was his popularity with the British public. Where Blair’s approval ratings have steadily declined since the end of a war he won, Eden’s approval ratings steadily rose following a war he ...”

“... was L’Étoile rose, published in 1978, polemical, didactic and occasionally soupy. The narrator, David, welcomes the arrival of the word ‘gay’ in France from America, comparing it to the dove returning to Noah’s Ark with its message of hope, though he admits it hasn’t quite taken to its new habitat. In the new memoir as well as in L’Étoile rose ...”

“... Worry Kyoko’ and ‘John, John’, Yoko’s contributions to the Plastic Ono Band’s Live Peace in Toronto 1969 – but you could always spin back to Rubber Soul or Revolver for a big family get-together, repatriating Lennon to the land from which he’d done a very noisy runner. ‘That . . . album with the drawing by Klaus Voorman on it,’ he ...”

“... to 1953 and is set in rural Mississippi, a landscape of baked clay and shacks with cinder yards. David, the hero-narrator, grows up an only child in redneck poverty. His shiftless father drifts from job to job, beats his wife and lets David get beaten up by young thugs his own age. The family are ostracised by respectable ...”