“... Niazi, chose surrender rather than martyrdom, for which his colleagues, a thousand miles from the battlefield, were never to forgive him. In December 1971, East Pakistan became Bangladesh and 90,000 West Pakistani soldiers ended up in Indian prisoner of war camps. Nixon, Kissinger and Mao had all ‘tilted towards Pakistan’ but to little ...”

“... with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement’ – and also of Richard Gregory, and his ‘perceptual hypotheses’. The illusions, the apparitions, whatever I should call them, were clearly conjectures, guesses ... perceptual hypotheses. While utterly helpless amid pandemonic illusions, I said fiercely and desperately to ...”

“... attitude is described as ‘the unease of conquerors: the unseemliness of finding themselves few miles from Hiroshima’. In 2007, looking back across a distance of sixty years, Hazzard said that the visit to Hiroshima taught her to start thinking ‘with compassion or imagination of the people who were our enemies, who had gone to blazes in those two atomic ...”

“... doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason’. In a letter of 1818 to his friend Richard Woodhouse, Keats describes it like this:When I am in a room with People if I ever am free from speculating on creations of my own brain, then not myself goes home to myself: but the identity of every one in the room begins to press upon me that, I am in a ...”

“... think of as normal classic names: Simon, Mark, Peter, Andrew, Paul, Martin, Michael, Stephen, Richard, Robert, David. Girls’ names remained more modish: some Sarahs, Anns and Elizabeths and even some residual Marys, but also plenty of Janets, Jackies, Lisas and Debbies, who soared and plummeted through the bestseller lists in the space of a couple of ...”

“... generals are said to have been horrified when Sargent opened Thayer’s valise. According to Richard Murray of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the prototype garment resembled an old hunting jacket, trailing strips of coloured cloth and daubed with patches of colour that reflected Thayer’s interest in harlequin costumes. It’s not clear whether ...”

“... These men and women had been noticed before: they were the ‘silent majority’ invoked by Richard Nixon. The speechwriter who coined that phrase, Pat Buchanan, would become the insurgent Republican of the 1992 primaries, and at the 1992 party convention he gave a speech that seems the prototype for Trump’s inaugural. In fact, Trump delivered no ...”

“... is a massively ugly parody-arch in the middle of nowhere. You see it coming up on the horizon from miles away. (‘The majestic Memorial to the Missing,’ says Miss Coombs, ‘stands amid fields still scarred with the trench lines of the Leipzig Redoubt.’) Blakey would call it fugly. Loads of Castles among the 73,000-or-so incised names, though nobody known ...”

“... invited the Times’s New York lawyer down to discuss it, he booked the visitor into a motel forty miles away under an assumed name. Would it have mattered if the national press had been scared off by those libel actions and had stopped paying close attention to the racial conflict? I think it would have made a great difference. Most Americans were not aware ...”

“... writers, Camus ‘was prepared for the postwar spectacle of American racism’. He had also read Richard Wright, whose work he arranged to be translated by Gallimard. Yet in his North American diaries he has little to say about the ‘Negro Question’, other than that a Martinican employee of the French embassy, forced to rent in Harlem, had only just ...”

“... Diop drew a community of black intellectuals, including African Americans like Langston Hughes and Richard Wright, to the offices of Présence Africaine. Andrade was working with Césaire on a new edition of his long poem Cahier d’un retour au pays natal and compiling an anthology of African poetry. In 1956 Diop organised the first Congress of Black Writers ...”

“... our place – un-air-conditioned, and where we will share a bed – she has already walked seven miles, been to the Pantheon, and sent me a picture of a McDonald’s billboard with a picture of French fries above the word ‘Gnammm’.I feel I have hardly left the house, or the inside of my own head, since Jason’s surgery last summer. Hope and I have, we ...”

“... inaccessible to sea-going ships; they usually transferred their cargoes at Greenock, three or four miles further west, to smaller vessels, barges and wherries that were rowed or poled the final twenty-odd miles to the Glasgow warehouses. Greenock’s near monopoly in the transhipment business irritated Glasgow’s merchants ...”

“... lost its Soviet patron, Iraq has been devastated by three disastrous wars and Iran is hundreds of miles away. The Palestinians barely have an effective police force, let alone an army that could pose a threat to Israel. According to a 2005 assessment by Tel Aviv University’s Jaffee Centre for Strategic Studies, ‘the strategic balance decidedly favours ...”

“... at night around public lavatories, and further out, at Wimbledon Common (‘exactly five miles from the bright lights of Piccadilly’), where in 1963 a reporter from the News of the World, high on disgust, observes ‘that misguided collection of misfits known as The Queers’ assembling after dusk (they sound like a band from a couple of decades ...”