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“... led al-Suri to assume, not unreasonably, that he and other jihadis had a tacit agreement with John Major that they ‘would never target Britain as long as the security forces left us alone’, and he abided by the ‘truce’. He spoke regularly to al-Zawahiri from a telephone box in the London suburbs, and came to serve as a liaison between British ...”

“... of them was that the Church bought out its partners at an early stage and at a generous price. Sir John Hall, the Newcastle entrepreneur, was bought out of the Gateshead Metro shopping centre before it was built. He got £40m, but the Church kept losing money on the project until it was finally sold at a staggering loss in 1990. Sir ...”

“... only other models,’ she writes in this new biography, ‘are Renaissance figures such as John Dowland and Thomas Campion.’ (She might have looked sideways to Noël Coward, Bob Dylan or Cole Porter; to John Cage’s poetry, Ezra Pound’s operas, the compositions of Christopher Fry or Anthony Burgess.) One of the ...”

“... the problem of the Minister of Health. By contrast, at one point during the Suez invasion in 1956 Major Salah Salem thought that Gamal Abdul Nasser should give himself up personally to the British ‘because it is only you they want’: the Egyptian leader contented himself with sending the major into retirement with his ...”

“... Karin Roffman​ ’s superb biography of John Ashbery’s early life concludes with a photograph of the poet striding towards the camera. He is a tallish, handsome young man. The photograph was taken in the autumn of 1955 when he was 28, shortly after he arrived in Montpellier to begin his Fulbright Fellowship. He looks to have the world at his feet ...”

“... possible. Shockley worked out first the theory of semiconduction, and then set his colleagues John Bardeen and Walter Brattain to work on a practical device to manipulate electrical current on a semiconductor. On 23 December 1947 they demonstrated the first working transistor. That invention won the three men the Nobel Prize for physics in 1956.Shockley ...”

“... a popgun. Her glib palaver is most regrettable in her account of Wilson’s relationship with his major director, Lloyd Richards, whom he called ‘my guide, my mentor, my provocateur’. Their collaboration on six plays of the cycle was as intimate and as important to American theatre as that of Elia Kazan and Tennessee Williams. In both cases, the plays ...”

“... episode in the transformation of Britain from a minor power with a dynastic foreign policy to a major one with an imperial destiny. It laid the foundations of the constitutional practices which would be exported round the world. In Scotland it overthrew the Episcopalian state church and led to the Act of Union. In Ireland it crushed the Catholic bid for ...”

“... Iain McCalman has written a major book on a minor subject. It would not be fair to the considerable achievement of Dudley Miles in his life of Francis Place simply to invert this formula: but Place’s life is a major subject, and this treatment of it – the first in almost a hundred years – does leave a sense of possibilities not explored ...”

“... fact, the late, and justifiably lamented, Earl Mountbatten, and the excerpt is taken from his last major speech, delivered to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) on 11 May 1979. The complete text has been reprinted by CND under the heading ‘The Speech We Ignored’. The question is: who is ‘we’? Not the disarmament ...”

“... at most responded to the call. They occupied several districts of the city, but failed to secure major strategic objectives, such as bridges and ammunition supplies. In less than a week, the AK had yielded the offensive, and began sacrificing block after city block in heavy fighting. The Germans often advanced against the insurgents with civilians strapped ...”

“... lack of change in its composition. Our rulers are still drawn disproportionately from the nine major public schools (as defined by the Clarendon Commission report of 1864) and Oxbridge. Twenty per cent of Who’s Who entrants born in the years before 1880 attended these schools, and the figure is still around 10 per cent for those born between 1945 and ...”

“... we observe is ‘fine tuned for life’, a claim that was investigated in the book which he and John Barrow co-authored, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle. It enters, too, into his expectation that our universe will be found to satisfy the many ‘Omega Point Theory predictions’ which he generates. These predictions concern conditions which he thinks ...”

“... he asks why, by 1965, there was no recognition of criticism in music-academic circles, given the major role it played in American academic literary studies, which at the time were engaged in a withdrawal from the New Criticism and in wrestling with the work of Northrop Frye. There was critical analysis of a particularly giddy sort centred on Princeton ...”

“... with self-referentiality. The March of the Long Shadows is set in Sicily in 1947. The narrator, John Philips, is keeping a watchful British eye on the nascent movement for Sicilian separatism. Things begin badly, with a note which tells us that ‘all the languages and major dialects of Europe but one share the ...”