“... which most did not. They were regarded by most Soviet citizens as criminal enterprises. In 1988, I took a Soviet journalist to the first co-operative restaurant in Moscow: he was boorish with the waiters, complained that the food was bad and carped at the size of the bill. For him, restaurants were either the awful stolovayas (canteens), or the often ...”

“... of US-Soviet relations, complete with a speech by Olivia de Havilland … The next day, John Wayne learns that the Selective Service board has extended his 3-A deferment. Hot dog! The star celebrates Thanksgiving Day by carving turkeys at the canteen, even as Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin meet in Tehran to plan the US invasion of Europe. The ...”

“... classicus in the study of computing, robotics and futurism, and is discussed at length in both John Kelly and Steve Hamm’s Smart Machines and Tyler Cowen’s Average Is Over.2 Watson won, easily. Its performance wasn’t perfect: it thought Toronto was in the US, and when asked about a word with the double meaning ‘stylish elegance, or students who all ...”

“... and on that very day, wandering around the Reichschancellery, went into Hitler’s office and took out a selection of his desk stamps – ‘The Führer has confirmed’, ‘The Führer has agreed’ and so on. It’s difficult to imagine a more definitive closeness to the action than that. Quite a few writers covered the war as journalists and covered it ...”

“... in Rome among the Yanks: We are the D-Day Dodgers In sunny Italy … Naples and Cassino, we took them in our stride, We didn’t go to fight there, we just went for the ride. Anzio and Sangro were just names – We only went to look for dames; The artful D-Day Dodgers In sunny Italy. Dear Lady Astor, you think you’re mighty hot, Standing on a ...”

“... all talking about the same house in a backstreet in Chania. Each of them had given the painter John Craxton a lump sum to repair it, in exchange for a half share in the ownership. None of them minded the imposture, which had been going on for about twenty years, and they all remained friends with Craxton, which says something about his character. His ...”

“... that day at the crimes of England and her associated military reprobates. One who did so was Major John C. Spahr, an executive officer with Marine Fighter Attack Squadron 323, based at Marine Corps Air Station Miramar in San Diego, but serving during the spring of 2005 in the Persian Gulf on the USS Carl Vinson. Major Spahr was 6 feet 3 inches tall and did a ...”

“... my passport did they seem to accept, with reluctance, that I had a booking. I was given a key and took my own bag upstairs. The room was a cramped, overfurnished space with thin brown walls. On the desk was an envelope of conference materials including a laminated pass on a lanyard and a printed programme. It was at that point that I realised I had been ...”

“... and one about a country. The people are Thatcher, Deng Xiaoping, Ayatollah Khomeini and Pope John Paul II. The place is Afghanistan. The year 1979 mattered to all of them. It was the year Thatcher won her first general election. The year Deng embarked on the economic reforms that would transform China. The year the Iranian Revolution swept Khomeini to ...”

“... Nash Sovremennik was flooded with letters of support, while the term ‘Russophobia’ immediately took hold in the polemics of the warring literary factions. The popularity of Shafarevich’s essay as a rallying-point for beleaguered Russian nationalists is easy to appreciate. It joined such famous works as Pushkin’s ‘To the Slanderers of Russia’ as a ...”

“... What went to form the Christian culture which Reichenau symbolises? Everyone knows that it took the careful preservation of Early Christian beliefs and practices through the so-called Dark Ages, and the maintenance along with them of the remnants of Classical civilisation, to create the possibility of ‘Europe’, conceived as a Christian continuation ...”

“... he also severed the veins in his ankles and behind the knees, dictated a sermon (later published), took poison from a doctor friend, was lowered into a warm bath and finally suffocated in a steam-bath. The point of recounting all this was not, however, to prove that the historian had any more knowledge of what actually happened than Gerrit van Honthorst, the ...”

“... not buried or buried but not remembered, was more like a basement than a pantheon. So the nation took its atavism elsewhere: to places like Stoke Poges, where Thomas Gray was buried in the churchyard he’d made legendary, and especially to Stratford, sanctified by the grave of Shakespeare. This argument about nationalism isn’t watertight, since it was ...”

“... One of this book’s chief virtues is candour. If John Cummins first saw Drake as the knightly figure sans peur et sans reproche who had been held up for admiration to so many generations, it must have grieved him to find how far upwards the feet of clay could reach. But he states the facts with a fine impartiality ...”

“... helps explain why Bevis Hillier has written an enormous biography of a dead English minor poet. John Betjeman: New Fame, New Love is the second volume of Hillier’s proposed trilogy and covers, roughly, the years 1933-58, the period when Betjeman, as Larkin put it, ‘became Betjeman’. The book is 736 pages long. Its predecessor, Young Betjeman, was 477 ...”