“... only an affiliated organisation like the ILP, the Fabian Society or a trade union), which was by far the most powerful body in the Labour Party in Scotland. The atmosphere of the Clyde in the early 20th century was in large part its creation. In When the Clyde Ran Red, Maggie Craig quotes an article published in the Times just after the 1922 election ...”

“... black and white like a bovine zebra. It’s a delightful object, a convict cow, and could she be bothered to make more and market them I’m sure they would sell for a substantial price. As it is, it stands on the kitchen table waiting to find its – or her – place. A lovely thing. 31 December. Because some 25 years ago The Madness of King George was ...”

“... of American identity, as Baldwin put it, has given rise to endless attempts at definition, by foreign observers as well as Americans. The French film critic Serge Daney, who loved America’s cinema as much as he despised its imperialism, called it ‘the place that makes it possible to dream, but also the corner of reality that dreams crash ...”

“... yourself, and you may fight a hundred battles and not lose one. Sun Tzu, The Art of War, c.450 BC The historian William Manchester, who served with him in the Pacific, said he was the greatest soldier in American history. Never much regarded in Britain, he is still recalled with loathing in Australia. When Americans remember him, it is with something close ...”

“... one murder than 600,000 – the number murdered in the Armenian atrocities of 1916-17 or by Nazi Einsatzgruppen on the Eastern Front in 1941 before the death camps were fully geared up – or five to six million, the best estimates we have of the number of Jews murdered in the camps. At a purely cognitive level, any number can ...”

“... father of Greek medicine than to Greek root-gatherers. ‘From Hippocrates to Biomedicine’ might be its working title: a world-historical tale of how ‘Western medicine’ broke with the ‘traditional wisdom of the body’ and became global. The scope and chronology of the first narrative are also more or less traditional: eighty pages take us from the end ...”

“... By the time I was twenty I was living in a slum house in Sheffield. I had a husband and no money; those things I could explain. I had a pain which I could not explain; it seemed to wander about my body, nibbling here, stabbing there, flitting every time I tried to put my finger on it.When I packed my bags for London, at 18 years old, I went to live in a women’s hall of residence in Bloomsbury ...”

“... By the time I worked out the style of our death the leaves were back on the trees. The journey in search of rubbish had taken the whole winter long and now I was here with the bins. The evening it was all over I emptied the latest rubbish onto some newspapers spread out on the kitchen floor – a cornflakes packet and old razor blades, apple cores and cotton buds ...”

“... with only a certain doggedness about her actions an indication of her gender. One or two passers-by look twice and a neighbour posting a letter stops to talk – and what enables him to break the ice is that she is a woman doing a man’s job. 8 January. By train to Cambridge on a day of blinding sunshine and bitter ...”

“... from ‘purpose to passion to perception’, terms borrowed from the critic Kenneth Burke. By the time Ellison began writing the book, in the summer of 1945, he believed that anyone could gain a clearer mind, but only through an encounter with failure or anguish. According to the Greek proverb quoted by Burke in A ...”

“... spate of celebrations to mark the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or, the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. In Mysore, Darwin Day was observed by an exhibition ‘proclaiming the importance of the day and the greatness of the ...”

“... or get excited about? Today the political climate across the Western world is marked, we are told, by a curious and disabling atrophy or disaffection. We do not care enough. The election of Obama would be the exception. His election was of course inspirational, notably in terms of collective life: the mass registration of ...”

“... January, Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany. On 24 February, the police, augmented by the newly enrolled ‘auxiliary police’ of stormtroopers grouped under such edifying names as the Robbers and the Pimp’s Brigade, raided Karl Liebknecht Haus. In anticipation of this, the KPD had been exfiltrating its records to private addresses. Its top ...”

“... in the days before your computer automatically date-stamped all your files book-writing used to be a clerical undertaking. It has Pluto Press Big Red Diaries from the 1970s, and a red leatherette Labour Party one, tooled with the pre-Kinnock torch, quill and shovel badge. There are bundles of postcards, including the ones sent over the years to Susannah ...”

“... Few discussions of literary obscurity fail to come to a climax with a story written by Kipling in the early 1900s, ‘Mrs Bathurst’. Conversely, most general critical treatments of the writer sooner or later brace themselves to try to explain what is going on in it. Excellent work has emerged from the process – Kipling can bring the best out of the good critic, and possibly the worst out of the bad ...”