“... Henry James – and not just the imagination, we might add. In this light, Trilling then says, we may feel that Tolstoy ‘gives us, after all, not reality itself but a sort of idyll of reality’. This is very intriguing, and a long way – too far, probably – from the old claim made by Babel and so many others. It was much in my mind as I read this new ...”

“... in film and legend for bravado, wept and pleaded. Farooq and the crew were not much moved. On 1 May, the Chinese informed Alan Chan, the ship’s owner in Singapore, that the Petro Ranger was safe. The crew remained in Chinese custody until 28 May, when they were allowed to leave. The Chinese confiscated what remained of ...”

“... figures in national memory from trouble-makers into healers, as Michael Eric Dyson puts it in I May Not Get there with You, an attempt to bring King back to political life. But while Lincoln turned in his last months from racial justice to national reconciliation, King had been moving in the opposite direction at the time of his death. Dyson’s book enters ...”

“... and indiscriminately directed against civilians’. Indeed, ‘even where rebels may have been present in villages, the impact of attacks on civilians shows that the use of military force was manifestly disproportionate to any threat posed by the rebels.’ These acts, the commission concluded, ‘were conducted on a widespread and systematic ...”

“... Nuba have achieved modest autonomy within the wider framework of a peace deal signed in Kenya in May. Bolad and a clandestine network of local activists were Garang’s entrée in Darfur. As he had done for the Nuba and Blue Nile, he dispatched a small expeditionary force into Darfur in 1991, aiming to begin an insurrection. It was a disaster. Bolad and his ...”

“... Fittko, who has no part in Birman’s story, made a preliminary excursion from Banyuls on what may well, it appears from her own memoir, Escape through the Pyrenees (1985), have been the same day. Fittko was a stateless anti-Fascist, an agitator and propagandist, born in Austria-Hungary; she had lived in Vienna, Berlin and Prague and was, by the end of the ...”

“... of 29, attainted for treason and supposedly drowned in a butt of malmsey. The barrel, though, may have been strung on Margaret after her death. The picture was cleaned in 1973, and study suggested that some original features have almost vanished. A pearl necklace is just a shadow now. The hands are the standard-issue long-fingered type; a black ...”

“... helped foster a revolution in sexual mores, politics and drug consumption? Schütte thinks they may be even more important than that. ‘Could, for example, techno have emerged from inner-city areas of Detroit without them?’ The link can’t be denied, but it’s something else to claim techno wouldn’t have happened if it weren’t for Kraftwerk. Techno ...”

“... which it is expressed have become hollowed out.From this selection box of youthful beauty readers may well choose Fyodor, the closest to an odd man out because he has no cultural pretensions and earns his living by manual labour. ‘Fyodor worked in beef, as a leaner’ – perhaps the most blue-collar sentence ever written. He cuts away the fat and ...”

“... woollen coat,’ he writes, ‘which covers the day labourer, as coarse and rough as it may appear, is the produce of the joint labour of a great multitude of workmen.’ He listed the shepherds, wool sorters, carders, dyers, spinners, weavers, fullers and dressers who ‘must all join their different arts in order to complete even this homely ...”

“... Stenton Jones, was a Yorkshireman and that is where his NME Yorkshire fantasy derives from. Bowie may have felt torn between his father and his half-brother, Terry Burns, whom Mr Jones did not much like: he made up another romantic story, alleging that poor Terry was a merchant seaman who had twice sailed round the world. A man’s life is conveniently seen ...”

“... from them, the Major Government has slowly but inexorably moved towards the second option. This may prove to be an impossible task: as, indeed, it deserves to be, since only one member of the present Cabinet can show a clean pair of hands. But the choice has been made. The Conservative Party is engaged in breaking with the recent past. It is a process that ...”

“... end of 1940 Britain was still a great power and firmly established on the road to victory.’ This may be a commonly held view, but a reading of Correlli Barnett’s Collapse of British Power (1969) ought to dispel it. It was Barnett who first argued that Britain’s financial crisis marked the end of independence and the conversion of Britain into an American ...”

“... Stephen Tennant, the subject of this excellent biography by Philip Hoare, in case some readers may not have heard of him. He was born in 1906, the son of a rich industrialist, Edward Tennant, who became Lord Glenconner in 1911, and of Pamela Wyndham, one of the Wyndham sisters immortalised by Sargent in his painting The Three Graces. Margot Tennant, who ...”

“... society, is entranced by, yet impatient with, the world of his grandparents, whose ancien régime may be represented by the Illustrated London News. He takes one of the great lines of English poetry and impatiently speeds it up, pragmatically recasting it in terms of his own inheritance: ‘They’re all gone into a world of light; the farm’s my own.’ For ...”