“... for the innumerable think-tank experts and ambitious academics and columnists who long to leave a mark on history, Kennan’s telegram remains the model: a set of policy prescriptions perfectly and powerfully in tune with the zeitgeist. Kennan died in 2005 at the age of 101: he had lived to see the emergence of a whole industry of geopolitical speculation ...”

“... he adopted his pseudonym in 1989, at the dawn of the country’s short-lived perestroika – he rose through the ranks of the army. Before leaving Algeria in 2000, he fought against the Islamists for eight years, and even helped lay two ambushes intended for his cadet school classmate Said Mekhloufi, by then an Islamist militant. (Mekhloufi was eventually ...”

“... argument, we need to turn to his account of what he calls positive liberty. Berlin’s attempt to mark off this separate concept is admittedly dogged by several false starts. He begins by suggesting that, whereas negative liberty is freedom from constraint, positive liberty is freedom to follow a certain form of life. But this distinction cannot be used to ...”

“... Mae West’s Belle of the Nineties came out in 1934 – but the 1920s were quicker off the mark. The Roaring Twenties, with James Cagney as its star, branded the decade only nine years after it ended. The Wall Street Crash and the ending of Prohibition, by utterly changing American life, had quickly sealed off the 1920s as history. Subsequent decades ...”

“... would bring fewer bills to cash, since they would be worth less. In this way, as discount rates rose, credit got tighter, and less money would be put into the economy. This would cause prices to fall, making local goods cheaper to foreign buyers and the cost of foreign goods more expensive. Again, exports would rise, imports would fall, and gold would flow ...”

“... prints were 850,000 years old, the oldest human footprints outside Africa and by far the earliest mark of human presence in Britain. Surging tides had exposed long-hidden marks of a group of H. antecessor walking upriver: an adult and a group of children travelling along the muddy estuary where the Thames used to meet the sea, until glaciers shifted its ...”

“... tenth of that owned by the local duke, a Tory, but they intended to be his political equals. They rose financially and socially through service to the army and the crown, at home and abroad. One Grey became private secretary to Prince Albert and then to Queen Victoria. Charles Grey’s father – the first Earl Grey – was a tough, blunt soldier who did well ...”

“... spontaneous wit besides. I was working with him at the time when Henry VIII’s flagship the Mary Rose was being laboriously raised from the depths of the Solent. This was being done by means of a cradle when suddenly a cable snapped and the wreck slipped back into the water.‘Ah,’ said Richard. ‘A slight hiccup on the atypical journey from grave to ...”

“... was taken on a widely publicised tour of ‘forty universities and 43 cocktail parties’. He also rose to prominence in the world of cinema, both as the screenwriter of Alain Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad – in which a glamorously distressed couple talk endlessly about whether or not they met the year before in a deserted hotel – and as the director ...”

“... who had been heavily pregnant at William’s funeral – had given her baby the middle name Rose. She had placed a rose in William’s coffin. Christine gave me a copy of what she called ‘William’s story’, written on seven A4 sheets of paper in an erratic mix of capital and lower-case letters.Christine is dead ...”

“... them in 1948 and had done nothing to help them since. The Palestinian national movement, which rose to prominence under Yasir Arafat’s leadership in the late 1960s, was defined in large part by its belief that Palestinians had to rely on themselves. Mahmoud Darwish was not the only one to note that during the siege of Beirut in 1982, when Israel invaded ...”

“... something understood by every human society known to history’. The novelist Christine Brooke-Rose, in an essay resigning her own deuxième carrière as a narratologist, describes narratology as ‘immensely useful. But in the end, it couldn’t cope with narrative and its complexities, except at the price of becoming a separate theoretical ...”

“... than sterile dilettante, officious critic and connoisseur (‘here you miss/Or there exceed the mark’). As such, the character clearly influenced a second writer, earlier than Thurber and much more distinguished. The Duke of Ferrara surely fathered Gilbert Osmond, Henry James’s lethal dilettante in The Portrait of a Lady: a man who at first represents ...”

“... on the evidence of Lewis’s perceptive and absorbing biography, that verdict falls wide of the mark. ‘Oh my sweet​ , how glad I am that we are not rich,’ Harold Nicolson wrote to his wife, Vita Sackville-West, after a visit to Cliveden in 1936, complaining about the ‘ghastly unreality about it all … like living on the stage of the Scala theatre ...”

“... with journeying, the kind of internal ‘itinerary’ which (in Mandelstam’s image) is the mark of achieved poetry. Like Clampitt, he draws inspiration from 18th-century and Romantic writers: a verse recipe in the manner of William King, 21 ‘Vignettes’ based on engravings by Thomas Bewick, and some distinctly Wordsworthian landscape poems feature ...”