“... I fear only France.’ He believed he had secured an agreement with the prime minister, Robert Peel, and Lord Aberdeen, his foreign secretary; they thought there had been merely a friendly discussion. All this was the background to the Crimean War of 1853-55, the subject of Orlando Figes’s admirable book. The war was at once the most dramatic ...”

“... later reflected, that he had had an experienced mentor to call on for advice – someone such as Robert Louis Stevenson, who ‘had always seemed to me “one of the family”’. Greene was distantly related to RLS through his mother’s cousin. ‘Names which appeared in his Collected Letters were photographs in our family album. In the nursery we played ...”

“... assets, Paulinus and Therasia – or their friends Melania and Pinianus, who visited Nola in the winter of 406 – had embraced poverty: they retained control over substantial resources. Shielded from the demands of family, local communities and the imperial tax system, they could use their newly unencumbered wealth to support Christian ...”

“... and country in the 1590s, had sought to resolve it. The first was James I’s leading adviser Robert Cecil, first Earl of Salisbury, Lord Burghley’s son, whose ‘Great Contract’ of 1610 attempted to place the Crown’s finances on a less vexatious footing. Bedford used parliamentary pressure to the same end in 1641. Adamson’s account bears out ...”

“... than riot and affray, and will stand young men in better stead than their combustion spree in the winter of 2005, prompted by the death of two teenagers electrocuted in Clichy-sous-Bois as they hid from the police in an EDF substation. The 2007 presidential election – the first round is on 22 April, with the run-offs on 6 May – has moved matters along at ...”

“... Sontag cited were so powerfully composed that they attained iconic status almost instantly: Robert Capa’s photograph from 1936 of a Spanish Republican fighter, arms flung out as a bullet hits him (that the photo may have been staged doesn’t alter its influence); or the image, taken in Vietnam in 1972 by the AP photographer Nick Ut, of terrified ...”

“... four children, on 6 January 1916, three months before the Easter Rebellion, in which her father, Robert Brennan, served as a commandant in the Irish Volunteers. Following the surrender ordered by Pearse, he was sentenced first to death and then to penal servitude for life but was released soon after and went on to organise the Department of External Affairs ...”

“... I knelt and started to pray and prayed for everybody I thought of, Brett and Mike and Bill and Robert Cohn and myself, and all the bullfighters, separately for the ones I liked, and lumping all the rest, then I prayed for myself again, and while I was praying for myself I found I was getting sleepy, so I prayed that the bullfights would be good, and that ...”

“... habit of reading Aristotle and Euripides between stops. He was very poor and weathered the deep winter of Chicago by wearing newspaper under his clothes; his colleagues liked to touch him to make him crackle. When Hamsun returned from the States he was 29, and although he had had no real literary success, he had already made himself something of an obstacle ...”

“... episodes in Lee’s biography concerns Wharton’s devastation when a catastrophic frost in the winter of 1928-29 wiped out virtually everything she had planted at Hyères. ‘How dangerous to care too much,’ she noted in her diary, ‘even for a garden!’ Wharton’s zeal for home-making had little to do with her feelings for her husband. Long before ...”

“... on the wane, the Oppens sent their daughter to college ” in the US, and paid her a visit that winter, though they themselves would not move back for another year or so. By then, Oppen had begun writing again. He had dreamed he was going through his father’s papers and found a file about preventing ‘rust in copper’. Copper does not rust, and the ...”

“... imitating her squint against sunlight. The writers she is most directly associated with – Robert Creeley and Ed Dorn – were of the Black Mountain School, but she seems somehow to have more to do with the Beats, perhaps because she was always on the run; perhaps because of the drug addiction of her third husband, Buddy Berlin; perhaps because you can ...”

“... vocation, for himself and his successors’. The Larkin-Davie standoff oversimplifies matters, as Robert Lowell intimated when he said that the two poets who meant most to him were Pound and Hardy. This might seem an unlikely double-act, yet more than half a century earlier Pound had suggested that Hardy be included in an anthology of Imagist poetry, and had ...”

“... studies – even the best-known of them, on The Historical Novel, written in Moscow in the grim winter of 1936-7 – invariably relate the Marxist scheme to the crude story-content of fiction: ‘Novels are approved because their content is approved and the content is the more approved the more it portrays the larger conflicts of society,’ Richard ...”

“... curve, migrating                     mouse-quivering water, mountain-driven winter water, in the high       tweed, stripping of fits mountains to run faster in its skin ... ‘Machine Portraits with Pendant Spaceman’ applies the same descriptive and mimetic skills to a bulldozer, an electric knife strop and ‘the space ...”