“... pattern of vines and flowers had been covered up with plain wainscoting long before the Davenants took over the establishment). Honan has one or two soft spots of his own, however: when sifting through the hearsay which accumulated in the years after the playwright’s death he shows a clear preference for material which presents Shakespeare as a ...”

“... of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. For a time, it worked. The Palestinians took pride in the achievements, however modest, of their young men against a vastly superior Israeli army with superpower weapons. Arafat had received support from the two key anti-Western Arab states, Nasser’s Egypt and Ba’athist Syria. But he had reason to ...”

“... but even here his illuminating suggestions must be weighed against the distinguished essay by John Creaser in the Lindley volume which points, heretically and convincingly, to the ‘royalism’ of Comus, or at least of the occasion for which it was written. The radicals were apparently against ‘authoritarianism’ – but who was more authoritarian ...”

“... others have covered it adequately, but he is not short of material, having had access to the John Fitzgerald Kennedy Library (where Hadley’s letters, alas without Ernest’s thousandfold replies, are stored) and many other major collections; indeed all the biographers appear to have been received with unusual generosity by the Hemingway family and the ...”

“... inferior and the incurably insecure. Kissinger belongs more to the second category. It took him a while to nerve himself, but having experienced the thrill of ordering and administering murder he was unable to get his fill of it. He grew sleek and satisfied, and more confident. He began to chafe at the status of number two. He began to slather his ...”

“... dark grey suits (no pinstripes), blue plastic helmets, heavy-duty wellies and – apart from John Prescott – full zip millennial grins. Showcased by a long-focus lens that tactfully blurs the background of industrial dereliction. Britain is Working. Handson management. Optimism. Good humour. That stuff. A cross between a hobbled moon walk and Neil ...”

“... entry into the world of international modernity, building on the ‘de-insularisation’ which took place during the Fifties, the breakthroughs of the Sixties and the steady advances of the Seventies and early Eighties. Rather than a meteor arriving out of the blue, the new generation of artists, who first came to public notice in 1988 with the Freeze show ...”

“... of delusion that prevents the masses from rising up in revolution. All were raised in what they took to be gilded cages in a hostile society; in his essay ‘A Berlin Chronicle’, Benjamin described the Jews in his neighbourhood as living ‘in a posture compounded of self-satisfaction and resentment that turned it into something like a ghetto held on ...”

“... had given producers – the national ear, and a national role – the post-war rearrangement took away. Like Gibbon’s Roman Empire, Features from its inception was doomed to decline and fall. For some years the fiction of its importance was maintained. The BBC was genuinely proud of its creative writers, its caged lions, among whom the poet MacNeice ...”

“... and a largely Kurdish part where the YPG is strong. When IS attacked the Arab district the US took no action. But as soon as IS moved to attack the Kurdish districts, US air raids were launched. Many analysts saw this strategy as flawed. They argued that IS should be seen as the greater evil, and that Assad’s forces should be assisted if that was what ...”

“... Heaney, who were both a few years ahead of him at St Columb’s Catholic Grammar School (where John Hume and Brian Friel had also been pupils), he belonged to the first generation to have access to free secondary schooling after the war. He went to university at Queen’s in Belfast, spent time in London, and by the mid-1960s was back in Derry, fired up by ...”

“... concludes his introduction to All What Jazz (1970), a collection of mainly unimpressed reviews of John Coltrane, Miles Davis et al that initially appeared in the Telegraph. ‘Sometimes I imagine them,’ he muses of the readers of his monthly column,sullen fleshy inarticulate men, stockbrokers, sellers of goods, living in thirty-year-old detached houses ...”

“... child’s development. To start with, you would notice the absence of a welcoming posture when you took your infant into your arms. Parents of such children in Baltimore were able to go to the new child psychiatry clinic. Kanner noted that the parents who came to see him were rather uptight professional people. Hence an inadvertent tragedy. He said the mothers ...”

“... was impervious to the language of quiet diplomacy, however firm. Mandela studiously avoided him; John Major agreed only to a preassigned question at a press conference, in response to which he would ask for clemency; and Jim Bolger, the New Zealand host, gave him an audience on condition that he didn’t tell the media, then asked him how his father’s ...”

“... where he stowed them behind some bins. News International security guards retrieved them and took them to Wapping while detectives searched the flat. The security guards then returned the bags to the car park, stashing them behind the bins along with a pizza. One of the guards, borrowing from Where Eagles Dare, texted his colleague: ‘Broadsword to ...”