“... up to and including testing, without having a human spy to witness it and tell us about it. He is frank about the numerous instances in which the whole detection apparatus failed, as it did in the first Soviet test of August 1949; the ‘Vela’ explosion in the South Atlantic in September 1979; the detonation by India of several devices, one ...”

“... response to a wound on the communal body. A recent profile in the New Yorker detailed some of the field research she did before she began to write, including two visits to Nigeria.Officials from the Irish Embassy picked her up. Her first ambition was to ‘meet girls who will tell me their story’, she recalled. O’Brien told me that she wanted ‘their ...”

“... details but not very interested in what they meant. Not even Theodor Mommsen could rescue the field, although he managed to place epigraphy at the centre of ancient historical studies.As well as this antiquarian taint, there is also the whiff of trade: academic numismatists have to rub shoulders with amateurs, many of whom possess great technical ...”

“... advisory’ firm, Hakluyt, to facilitate meetings with business leaders. Hakluyt began in a field in which the UK truly excels: private spying. Named after the Elizabethan geographer Richard Hakluyt, the company was founded in 1995 by a group of former MI6 agents, but in recent years has sought to distance itself from the world of spooks. Spying on ...”

“... the arguments about cultural identity, language, gender and inclusiveness stirred up by the 1991 Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, which covered 1500 years of work in Latin, Norman French, Gaelic and English. Les Murray’s New Oxford Book of Australian Verse and Anthology of Australian Religious Poetry included traditional work translated from ...”

“... the Police Investigations and Review Commissioner. Two more senior detectives, Cuddihy and Colin Field, took charge of the surveillance operation against the Turkish men. The exciting trappings of that investigation, the covert taping and Turkish-speaking undercover officers, seem to have blinded these men to the more mundane truth. ‘They thought they were ...”

“... questions for a charity literary quiz. Suggest:Q. Who thought the Venerable Bede was a woman?A. Field Marshal Haig, who said so after musing for some time beside the Venerable Bede’s tomb at Durham, presumably mixing up George Eliot and Adam Bede.Q. Where in Oxford would you find a crucifix that had been gazed on by Pascal?A. Campion Hall. (It is a ...”

“... Ireland in the 1950s, a place not altogether unlike the white-ruled South Africa evoked in the frank confessional of David Schalkwyk’s opening chapter. In the apartheid world, the young Schalkwyk ‘was defined legally, socially and … psychologically as a “master”’, even as the material realities of bondage were masked (and painfully ...”

“... had installed itself in the KPD headquarters, now conveniently vacant. Liddell was assisted by Frank Foley, MI6’s Berlin station chief, whose diplomatic cover was passport control officer. On 31 March, the two men entered Karl Liebknecht Haus, now renamed Horst Wessel Haus and sporting a huge swastika where only weeks earlier Lenin had stared out from a ...”

“... of colour. And I am always begging them to exploit the possibilities of drawing. It is the richer field.’ It was his sense of these possibilities that allowed Degas to take the ‘painting of modern life’ indoors, and to restore the primacy of the human figure in his carefully composed pictures of laundresses, drinkers, bathers, café ...”

“... imagine that he would have described a battle in Vietnam in much the same way, walking over the field after the shooting has stopped and telling the stories of each man dead or wounded, of the path of each bullet or piece of shrapnel through the body of a victim, of the heart rate of the shooter when he fired that bullet or shell, of his thoughts when he ...”

“... Julia took out a bank loan and established her own experimental girls’ school, Prior’s Field, near Godalming. It opened in January 1902. ‘It’s what I’ve always wanted to do,’ she said. Here, too, was the influence of Mrs Humphry Ward, who had already established schools for ‘cripples’, and the ‘playcentre’ care system for children ...”

“... used lethal injections, a technique perfected on Muselmänner. Dachau just shot them in a field – more than four thousand POWs died this way between September 1941 and June 1942. In the east a new and more promising technique was in development: the purpose-built gas chamber. On 5 September 1941 hundreds of Soviet POWs were forced into a cellar at ...”

“... whole European tradition. It suits me fine if that’s all down the drain.’ This happens to be Frank Judd speaking in the late 1960s, but all that distinguishes it from Futurist manifestos of fifty years before is its tone of lumpen disgruntlement. Allen Ginsberg, quoted in one of Butler’s epigraphs, says: ‘there is nothing to be learned from history ...”

“... and the argument over how to define and apply Constitutional freedoms begins to turn ugly. Judge Frank M. Johnson Jr, the great liberal Southern jurist on the 11th US Circuit Court of Appeals, who former Alabama Governor George Wallace called an ‘integrating, carpet-bagging, scalawagging, bald-faced liar’, explained the flammable Constitutional argument ...”