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“... arguing that the IRA would have to abandon the 1975 ceasefire and fight a lower-level ‘long war’ to exhaust London. But as that phase of the conflict unfolded, it became clear that a prolonged campaign wouldn’t be any more successful in forcing the Brits out. By the 1980s, when Adams was developing a political strategy to go alongside the military ...”

“... the Turkish village of Guenyeli and the Greek village of Autokoi. This was during the civil war at the time known as the Cyprus Emergency, and the aim of the mission was to prevent either village taking reprisals against the other. While his men were getting into position, Waugh noticed that something was blocking the elevation of the machine gun on the ...”

“... I thought of Lydia Davis’s story ‘Happiest Moment’, about a man in a beginners’ language class. ‘At last he smiled with embarrassment and said that his wife had once gone to Beijing and eaten duck there, and she often told him about it, and he would have to say the happiest moment of his life was her trip, and the eating of the duck.’ Imagine ...”

“... so emotionally involved, and her story was not at an end? Frankly tells the story of a shy working-class girl who made her way to the top, and what it cost her. But until events have run their course – until Murrell has appeared in court, which is unlikely to happen until after May next year, and the culture war has ...”

“... error, or who argue, in the face of that critique, that amnesty was the only way of averting civil war, do not put it quite like this. There is no doubt in Allan Boesak’s mind that the question of the Cradock Four would have been part of the secret negotiations between the ANC and the apartheid leaders: ‘The generals and architects of apartheid had ...”

“... unity. Trump has ignored them, so Clinton and Obama announce elaborate online events to honour the Class of 2020, who will not have graduation ceremonies this year; and Bush, who rarely speaks publicly, releases a slick video with music and images of health workers and ‘ordinary’ citizens in masks. He says: ‘Let us remember how small our differences are ...”

“... backwoods town of Salisbury in Southern Rhodesia may have seen a little excitement during the war, with passing armies, and loud meetings of brothers and sisters of the left arguing their position on this and that, but once the war was over and the soldiers on R&R had gone back to their real homes, it became a desert ...”

“... Not that Gay was unpartisan. He had fled the insanities of Nazi Germany before the war, and his ‘comprehensive interpretation’ of 18th-century thought was in part an expression of gratitude to the United States, which had welcomed him as a refugee and become his home. Gay presented the thinkers of the Enlightenment as a kind of family, cosy ...”

“... on it. There was no Facebook or Twitter, there were no smartphones to hunch over. The managerial class looked at early websites and tried to put them into existing categories: this one was a bit like an encyclopedia, that one was a bit like a library, this one was basically a mail order catalogue, and that one, well, it was just a newspaper, wasn’t ...”

“... subjected to repression, censorship and persecution under communist regimes during the Cold War was heroic. To assist individual writers in economic distress he conceived an ad hoc fund that channelled donations from an all-star roster of American authors, including William Styron, Bellow, Alison Lurie and Gore Vidal; even Irving Howe chipped in. It was ...”

“... terms by two years – a move which many see as the determination of the new political class to cling to office for as long as possible. Yeltsin’s memoirs don’t make it much easier to understand the contradictions. They are much more readable and interesting than those the notables of the Gorbachev era wrote, but that isn’t saying much. The ...”

“... of the ‘professional’ philosophical reaction; it reveals as much about the diversity of post-war philosophy as about the gulf between Marxism and analytical philosophy. Modern linguists, literary theorists, some dissident social scientists, were much more open to these European influences; that they made so little headway elsewhere merely proved what an ...”

“... Hawksmoor’s building: ‘I’ve never raped. I’ve never mugged. I’ve never robbed a working-class home.’ As he sank away towards the underworld of the crypt, we ascended the hierarchical steps to hear music by Messiaen and Hans Werner Henze. The frisson was undeniable. Earlier this year I went back to visit the disused synagogue at 19 Princelet Street ...”

“... Italy, in the early years of the century. The territory was fought over in the Second World War, and Anna’s own father is a shadowy Eighth Army officer described only as ‘plump and clumsy and mostly bald’. It is her grandfather’s life which appeals to her imagination, a life which she considers ‘lost’ because she is so anxious to recover ...”

“... dense woman who at the time she met Mew had just published a novel featuring the mixed gymnastics class at the Marylebone Polytechnic and was engaged in setting up the Medico-Psychological Clinic of London. Mew made, if not a pass (Mrs Fitzgerald is stern with Sinclair’s biographer, Theophilus Boll, who computed the number of times she bounded over the ...”