“... the Russells also gave Britain its last Whig prime minister, Conrad’s great-grandfather, Lord John Russell, later the first Earl Russell, who governed as a Whig from 1846 to 1852 and afterwards as a Liberal. If his own family history helped to bring into focus the indeterminacy of political commitments on the eve of the Civil War, it was his encyclopedic ...”

“... were several, including partisans operating behind enemy lines. It is thought that one of them was John Cairncross, one of the ‘Cambridge Five’, who had also been supplying Ultra information to the Russians from his post at Bletchley. That James’s information was both copious and refined by British Military Intelligence into an easily assimilable form ...”

“... Eamonn O Ciardha and Micheál O Siochrú makes clear. From Giraldus Cambrensis to the chronicler John of Fordun, medieval commentators from Britain had demonised the Gaels for their barbarous ways. Such sentiments still persist in the expected quarters. Ian Paisley claimed in the early 1980s that the forebears of the good Protestant folk of Ulster had ‘cut ...”

“... the Liberal Party of Herbert Asquith. Further schisms followed. The Liberal Nationals, under Sir John Simon, joined the National Government of 1931 and continued for the next thirty years co-operating closely with the Conservatives. Under the Woolton-Teviot Agreement of 1947 the Liberal Nationals changed their name, confusingly, to the National Liberals, and ...”

“... with easy pleasures and made … playgoers work harder than they had ever worked before’. Citing John Aubrey’s image of a reclusive playwright who was never ‘a company keeper’, Shapiro insists that the business of biography is not to attempt to recover ‘Shakespeare in love’ but rather to discover ‘Shakespeare at work’. As its recasting of ...”

“... to deal with the equally relentless productivity of the Dickens industry? Since his best friend John Forster published The Life of Charles Dickens (1871-76), the vagaries of Dickens’s life and the brilliance of his writing have led to countless attempts to interpret, diagnose or explain the man through the writing, or the writing through the man. Certain ...”

“... awestruck by the philosopher Owen Barfield, and had a quite saintly manner of carefulness with John Berryman, but, these things apart, the volume is quite fogged over with Bellow’s notion that replying to letters was nothing if not a complete and utter waste of time. To Ralph Ellison: ‘I’ve never enjoyed writing letters. Vasiliki says that ...”

“... the revival of liberal political philosophy in the United States in the 1960s, and his reviews of John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin remain some of the most acute there are. But these philosophers started from within. They may have been prompted to write by the establishment of civil rights in the 1960s and the domestic consequences of the Vietnam War, but these ...”

“... contemporaries) much more by what he said than by what he did. In the third and final volume of John Röhl’s immense biography of Wilhelm II, the Kaiser’s voice is the thread that holds the text together. On page after page, he cajoles, whines, demands, vociferates and babbles, bombarding his interlocutors (and the reader) with fantastical geopolitical ...”

“... of the previous generation, he or she might well have mentioned, alongside Darwin and John Stuart Mill, the name of Sir Henry Maine, the subject of Karuna Mantena’s valuable new study. His name isn’t heard much anymore, but in his own day Maine (1822-88) was regarded as a towering public intellectual. He became regius professor of civil law at ...”

“... a failure.’ Blair flashed with silent dismay. Hearing the truth was unpleasant. With Elton John, another guest, seated nearby, there was no opportunity for a proper discussion but Anderson’s views on the NHS were no secret. Blair’s reforms were grinding to a halt. Indeed: must be hard to have a serious policy discussion when Elton ...”

“... On 15 June 2009, Gordon Brown announced an inquiry into the Iraq war – to investigate, as Sir John Chilcot, the inquiry’s chairman, put it, ‘the UK’s involvement in Iraq, including the way decisions were made and actions taken, to establish, as accurately as possible, what happened and to identify the lessons that can be learned’. Although oral ...”

“... by Bill Clinton, and stayed on through 9/11 up until 2005, when he became the principal deputy to John Negroponte, the first director of national intelligence. In 2006, George W. Bush appointed him director of the CIA, where he stayed until 2009, when Barack Obama replaced him with Leon Panetta. During Hayden’s ten years at the top, the intelligence ...”

“... load, in a cycle repeated many times over – ‘more than one thousand cartloads’, according to John Stow – before the carters could be paid and sent home. Afterwards, the area was covered over with ‘soylage of the citie’ … [T]he carts were filled with human remains … [which] had been lodged in the great ossuary of the cathedral … located under ...”

“... during the summer of 2007 after carrying out a series of grisly beheadings of criminal rivals. John Michuki, then minister for internal security, instituted a shoot-to-kill policy. Five hundred people died in the subsequent crackdown – most shot in the back of the head. Even as the anti-Mungiki crackdown continued, rumours were circulating in Nairobi ...”