“... the period, and it may he that the message is as well. For the poet’s death was shortly followed by a critical work, Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era (1974), which placed him at the head of the ‘Men of 1914’, and chronicled in elegiac terms his lifelong struggle to reanimate a moribund literary culture. Brown shifts the emphasis from Pound Era to Group ...”

“... of citizenship, of civility, of membership of and participation in a community bound together by ties of mutual obligation. The second is the theme of the mixed economy or the developmental state, of a socially just and economically productive balance between market forces and public intervention. The citizenship theme weaves in and out of the political ...”

“... which have long passed unquestioned. The front-runner was W.G. Hoskins, an economic historian by training, who since the Second World War has inspired a great new army of local historians with a series of writings which have demonstrated, among much else, how the landscape can be ‘read’, while hammering home the ...”

“... obvious that the follies and misadventures which have plagued it during the last few months can be understood only against the background of the betrayals, suspicions and hatreds of more than a generation of civil war. It is not, of course, the only mass party of the Left in trouble. The German Social Democrats – only a few years ago, one of the most ...”

“... remove enough: cancer cells remained in the body, the seeds of future tumours, sometimes spread by surgeons themselves. His solution was to cut deeper and farther, removing not only the breast but also the skin, neighbouring lymph nodes, muscles and, at times, parts of the ribcage or shoulder. Mukherjee argues that Halsted’s approach was too radical for ...”

“... The anti-government insurgency in Syria was given an intoxicating vision of triumph by the words President Obama spoke in August 2011 that were translated, correctly, into the headline ‘Assad must go.’ He had earlier conveyed similar messages: ‘Mubarak must go’ and ‘Gaddafi must go.’ Obama may have entertained the idea that he was playing a benign role in the Arab Spring – showing himself ‘on the right side of history’, as he likes to say ...”

“... of the developers, partly in homage to the dead and partly because people feel it necessary to be able to walk where others actually died. (The phrase now routinely invoked for the World Trade Center site in lower Manhattan, ‘sacred ground’, was, we recall, coined at Gettysburg.) Elsewhere in the same day’s newspaper, we read that the developer of ...”

“... Knopf apparently kept the book from being twice as long. As it is, I am guessing that it will not be widely or deeply read. One reviewer has described it as a literary bumper-sticker, something you have around the house to show your loyalty. Many readers will look up Lewinsky in the index and scan those four or five pages in the bookshop. The ...”

“... served their country and party honourably, faithfully and as selflessly as anyone can reasonably be expected to do. Both exhibited, to an almost alarming degree, the characteristic Fabian virtues of rationality and reliability. Both are so obviously fish out of water in the Labour Party of the Eighties that the reader can almost hear them gasping for ...”

“... aristocratic grandeur. Some indication of Mayfair’s stately, splendid and sumptuous past may be gleaned from the acknowledgements page in this appropriately stately, splendid and sumptuous volume, where names like Abercorn, Derby, Mountbatten, Scarbrough and Wemyss surge before the reader’s eye, in a cascade of coronets. Since Lady Bracknell’s ...”

“... get smaller, nimbler, leaner. It is the story of a steady, seemingly inexorable advance, followed by a sudden and rapid retreat, as the state was determinedly ‘rolled back’. It is a heroic story, with an obvious heroine, and that alone ensures that it has not gone unchallenged. Many people doubted at the time, and continue to doubt, the purity of Margaret ...”

“... survey of womanhood has recently attracted a great deal of attention, much of it stimulated by the massive 1988 exhibition of Degas’s work, and by the publication in the same year of Richard Thompson’s magisterial primer, Degas: The Nudes. Feminist art criticism, in particular, has added richness and edge to ...”

“... Markus Wolf. When the Berlin Wall fell, three years after his retirement in 1986, Wolf was courted by other intelligence services – West German, American, even Israeli – who hoped to exploit his vulnerable position. Instead he went to Moscow. Returning after the failed August coup of 1991, he was eventually tried in a Düsseldorf court and found guilty of ...”

“... vulgar, nutty rather than when brought together in deference or respect for occasions invented by their betters’ is to grasp something of the extraordinary national appeal of Morecambe and Wise in the Seventies, and to see why the British might prefer the unworldly wisdom of a tall, balding man in a string vest and khaki shorts and his short fat friend ...”

“... people. In our own apparently democratised First World there are few kings and princes who need to be reminded not to be tyrants, and the occasional exposure of corrupt corporate moguls presents the spectacle merely of cheap greed brought to some sort of justice without convincing anyone that the body politic is thereby ...”