“... I had some kind of heart problem and therefore wasn’t allowed to do games, which I was very keen on.All games?Well, soccer particularly.Cricket?Not so much. I liked cricket but I was never any good at it. I wasn’t allowed to play games because of this so-called heart problem. It was something I got after I’d had scarlet fever, a sort of follow-up to ...”

“... to the apex of the huge new temple of Zeus at Olympia itself, the closest thing to a pagan St Peter’s: a gilded Victory stood on a shield, with an inscription, since rediscovered, commemorating the battle. The Athenians must have bristled at the fact that a monument of their military humiliation was on display for eternity in just about the most ...”

“... that little had changed. (The book was published in Spanish in 1981; the English translation by Peter Bush comes out this summer.) As a landlord and his guests languorously discuss peasants and their lack of culture, he boasts that there are no illiterates among his tenants, and to prove it he invites some of them to the dining room to display their ...”

“... Yorkers, Mamdani’s anti-Zionism isn’t a problem.In fact, it may even be an asset, since, as Peter Beinart wrote recently, support for Israel has become ‘a symbol of the timidity and inauthenticity of party elites’. According to Gallup, only one in three Democrats has a favourable view of Israel. While the party’s leaders – notably Senator Chuck ...”

“... Buildings. This was an excellent match from the Walkers’ point of view, one they were no doubt keen to repeat for Sarah, now in her late teens, and their other children, Micaiah (Cajah), Leonora Elizabeth (Betsey), Emma and baby John. Here, in the summer of 1820, William Hazlitt entered their lives, and here Sarah steps into the limelight of the Liber ...”

“... when I asked what a man of his eminence was doing in a crowded, chaotic hospital. He was a keen Chelsea supporter and in between carrying out the tests on Josephine he and I chatted about the great days of Charlie Cooke, David Webb and Peter Osgood. He told me it was already too late to try AZT and 3TC on Josephine ...”

“... and they may have helped him onto a new footing. Back in London he went into the streets and was keen for the first time to capture passers-by and their shadows. He was ‘oppressed and depressed’ that summer, and his essay for Longman’s grew out of all of these energies.It was prompted by a pamphlet, originally a lecture, by Walter Besant, which made ...”

“... most of which would have been to pay for continuous care. Ledwidge also tells the story of ‘Peter’, who served with him in the same reservist unit. A talented linguist, physically fit and a promising commander, he was seen as an ideal candidate for special forces, but was seriously injured in a bomb attack in 2006. The MoD told him, wrongly, that as a ...”

“... based on the sexualisation of people too young to cope? And why is it that we have a press so keen to feed off it? Is it to cover the fact, via some kind of willed outrage, that the culture itself is largely paedophile in its commercial and entertainment excitements? Milly Dowler’s phone was hacked by journalists cynically feeding the ravenous appetites ...”

“... included. Dugouts became billets, the more provisional the more intensely inhabited, and he had a keen awareness of carrying around a soldier’s body in peacetime as a snail its shell. At one point he half-heartedly rented a room in Kensington, as an experiment in leaving home, from which in turn the homes of friends became his refuge. His Catholic ...”

“... hope to that saving possibility and not hold out against the occupying forces. His biographer, Peter Dodge, traces all the tortuous visions and revisions that led up to this ultimate misjudgment. He sees Hendrik de Man as a tragic figure, forced into exile (and convicted of treason in his absence), not so much through opportunism, compromise or worse, as ...”

“... go to the highest bidder, while the best way of giving consumers value for money is to encourage keen competition in the telecommunications marketplace. The Government is trying to do the opposite: Jay Naidoo will decide who the buyers should be and will try to insist that there is no single buyer but a consortium (which can only be done by forbidding ...”

“... category is most tellingly exhibited in the case of American subjects. OUP has been understandably keen to enhance the appeal of the dictionary in the United States; the inclusion of more than 700 inhabitants of the American colonies before 1776 is one cunning but defensible way to do this. But how thereafter are the discriminations to be made, given that ...”

“... schools – and that was only ‘the tip of the iceberg’, according to the report’s author, Peter Clarke. Last summer, when he was still secretary of state for education, Michael Gove floated the idea of requiring schools to teach British values. In November, the DfE issued what it called ‘strengthened guidance’ on ‘promoting British values in ...”

“... empires, in the avuncular figure who proposed the Tennessee Valley Authority. At any rate, keen endorsement of either statesman is a distinctly bizarre way of registering any kind of objection to social engineering. Thus, there are contradictions in his view, but they languish from being untreated by their author. At least Lloyd George and ...”