“... Deobandi madrasas formed the backbone of the Taliban movements in Afghanistan and Pakistan. They may only account for between 15 per cent and 20 per cent of the Pakistani population but their willingness to take up arms – especially since they were encouraged to do so during the anti-Soviet struggle in Afghanistan – has given them disproportionate ...”

“... itself took the form of a collection of pensées) are clearly a labour of love. Auden may have needed the money – he mostly wrote prose in the winter in New York to finance summers writing poetry in Europe – but he evidently took pride in his facility and his craftsmanship. Robert Lowell responded with a fellow craftsman’s appreciativeness ...”

“... amount of iridium would suggest it had taken a long time, indicating that the extinction process may also have been lengthy; a small amount would suggest that a quick event had overtaken the Earth. But the samples contained a surprise: huge amounts of iridium, so much that it would have taken tens or hundreds of millions of years to deposit at background ...”

“... Soviet leaders were increasingly keen that Chinese students come to Moscow: the German revolution may have foundered, but Soviet internationalists had not lost hope. In May 1925, anti-imperialist protests involving workers and students broke out in Shanghai, Guangdong and other major cities; later that year, the Chinese ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and enriched by his autodidactic efforts on the epistles of St Paul, some of which lost endeavour may survive as a residue in the Annotationes. Throughout this time, while he was becoming familiar with the Greek text underlying the received Latin version, his aim was not to edit the Greek, but to revise the familiar Vulgate. He compared the Vulgate, not only ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... even libertarians, who think that there should be no politically imposed limits on what people may retain of what they gain without force or fraud, believe in the equal right to exert oneself in the market and not to be taxed. Those who think that more effortful or productive or responsible work deserves higher rewards think that this principle should be ...”

“... are in the pictures; the accompanying text is workmanlike, informative and plain. ‘Children may not alter,’ say the authors, ‘but their expectations may do so,’ and, no doubt, by the early Victorian period, knowing young readers were looking askance at the nursery homilies tolerated by the previous ...”

“... and a good housewife’. In other words, Carrington is open to the idea that Kipling’s version may be intensely subjective – not the same thing as a lie – but this openness does not send him off into Seymour-Smithian suppositions about Harry Holloway, the son, ‘doing things’ to Kipling at night or about the depiction of Auntie Rosa (Mrs ...”

“... from extreme depression is something which we can reasonably believe. The word ‘depression’ may cause the reader to pause. We need, as it were, to shake ourselves in order to be clear in our minds that the richly learned word ‘melancholy’ could be used to refer to anything as simply distressing, as unglamorously desolate as depression. To be ...”

“... his assumption that the people would naturally do what the nobility told them. The assumption may surprise those historians who describe 17th-century England as a country ridden with class hatred, but 1688 bore it out. John Miller’s Seeds of Liberty, although emphasising the dependence of the Revolution on its acceptance by a broad and well-informed ...”

“... of its own categories are mysterious, if not invisible. This blend of the familiar and strange may explain our tendency to seize upon Japan as the very image of the contemporary. Having apparently jumped straight from pre-modernism to postomodanizumu, its culture seems both bewilderingly fluid and monumentally static. Even Baudrillard, it has been ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to 1326; so these neighbours had no historical claims to Bosnia at all. Some Serbs and Croats may now claim that Bosnia is an artificial entity, but the fact is that its core lands have been together consistently, and calling themselves Bosnia, since the 13th and 14th centuries: first as an independent state, next as a recognised unit in the Ottoman ...”