“... and his misfortune was greeted with a gleeful salvo of puns and bon-mots, an echo of which can be heard in the title of Ian Kelly’s splendid new biography. Ever the theatrical opportunist, he was soon back onstage, with a new prosthesis and two new comedies fit for purpose: The Lame Lover, in which he played the lecherous Sir Luke Limp; and The Devil ...”

“... of the Suffolk Regiment, to the Far East in the winter of 1941. After a 20,000-mile journey by sea, the Suffolks arrived in Singapore on 29 January 1942. Unfortunately, the Japanese arrived less than two weeks later. Singapore had been heavily fortified against the expected attack from the sea, but proved to ...”

“... The registrar​ at Chelsea Town Hall on the King’s Road said that anything I told him would be assumed to be true: a notice on the desk next to his computer monitor explained the dangers of perjuring yourself. Then we began to go through the details of the death certificate. Name: Hugh Swynnerton Thomas ...”

“... owed their rise to trade, the more recent to oil. The heyday of the Gulf rulers threatens to be ephemeral. In their latest piece of brinkmanship, they have ruptured local alliances and sought protection from foreign powers. Petty squabbling – first over interests abroad, then at home – threatens to hasten their decline. As with the Renaissance city ...”

“... published a report called Slavery in America: The Montgomery Slave Trade, followed two years later by the first of three reports under the title Lynching in America, which between them detailed eight hundred cases that had never been documented before. The United States sometimes seems to be committed to amnesia, to ...”

“... a new magazine targeted readers who did not want it to end. Soldier of Fortune was founded by Robert K. Brown, a former Green Beret based in Boulder, Colorado, who made the profitable discovery that his publication could double as an employment agency for mercenaries and a weaponry catalogue. The magazine’s classified ads offered an eclectic menu of ...”

“... century. Nor do we find that Jewish mathematicians made major advances which were only discovered by the wider mathematical world much later, as was the case of the Indian mathematicians whose work between the 14th and the 16th centuries, written in the Malayalam language, remained unknown until the second half of the 20th. Or take chess, the excessive ...”

“... Or rather, the anti-Fonda cult. At places where soldiers or former soldiers congregate, there’ll be stickers of her likeness on the urinals; one is an invitation to symbolic rape: Fonda in her 1980s ‘work-out’ costume, her legs splayed, pudenda at the bulls-eye. Every night at lights-out midshipmen at the US Naval Academy cry out ...”

“... policy of granting autonomy to Soviet republics. That Ukraine is now caught up in meddling by the Great Powers is not, Putin argues, a new phenomenon; something similar happened after the First World War. But through and beyond it all the unity of the ‘triune people’ persists.Early modernists are familiar with this sort of retrospective ...”

“... Scotland styles itself instead as a place of co-operation and the commonweal. It is afflicted by the same soaring levels of poverty and workplace exploitation as the rest of the UK, but devolution has enabled the Scottish government, controlled by the SNP with the co-operation of the Scottish Greens, to try and ...”

“... to bring such things on.She already knew something of the family history, from a memory passed on by her own father. As a teenager, he had been woken in the middle of the night by his grandmother Betsy striking the wall that separated their rooms in the family holiday house with an iron, and shouting that he was ...”

“... of the excellences that Empson singled out was the happy chance of timing: the book ‘must be the last of its kind about Joyce’, he wrote, ‘because Mr Ellmann, as well as summarising all previous reports, has interviewed a number of witnesses who are now dead’. The number of witnesses was in fact immense: Leader calculates that 330 people from ...”

“... on the old) have taken their place. Most towns in Europe and North America are now served by only one newspaper, emphasising a trend towards monopoly of newspaper ownership and, with it, a return to the age of tycoon proprietorship which had begun to decline after the war. Most countries have seen a drop in newspaper readership (especially among ...”

“... write poetry without knowing, for example, about the proper use of runovers used to be considered as impertinent as it would be now to apply for a job as a truck driver without knowing how to shift gear.’ (Wearily, in a sanguine attempt not to be misunderstood, he ...”