“... forty pages on the separation of the uranium isotopes by diffusion. How easy it all was! General Groves, the American commander of the project, was notorious among the scientists for his obsession with security, but Fuchs could load a pile of secret documents, including a scale drawing of the plutonium bomb, into his car and drive out of the Los Alamos ...”

“... portray the Zionist pioneers waging a war of independence against the British oppressor. Jon and David Kimche provided a good example of the conventional Israeli analysis of British policy in Both Sides of the Hill: Britain and the Palestine War (1960). ‘It was a mixture of ignorance, blundering, indecision and local bias against the Jews, encouraged by ...”

“... circle, Who look upon the hills with tenderness, And make dear friendships with the streams and groves. But Mason really doesn’t care for ‘a coterie keen on pathetic fallacy’, and a touch of self-satire on Wordsworth’s part won’t win him round. The notes to the third poem in the series look ahead to the circle as it will appear in the fourth, as ...”

“... ambition rubbed off on critical admirers who grew up reading him in the 1940s and 1950s – David Sylvester, Lawrence Gowing and above all Richard Wollheim. In later life his own understated work as a painter from observation (‘the poor man’s Bonnard’ – he got the crack in first) gathered in conviction, and the showing after his death in 1972 of ...”

“... evidence to refute Goudsmit’s accusation, confirming the conclusion already reached in David Irving’s The German Atomic Bomb, that the German physicists wanted to build a reactor, but not a bomb. Their secretly recorded comments on Hiroshima have now provided further evidence of their reluctance; Heisenberg apparently regarded it as ...”

“... of Sir Moses Montefiore, who went there in the 1830s and wrote enthusiastically of the olive groves, the vineyards, the pasture land and the fine fields of wheat and barley. Peters gets the date of this visit wrong, and does not quote what he said. As Mr Cockburn has pointed out, Peters cites the historian Makrizi to back one of her statements about ...”

“... The Gaza-based Palestinian Centre for Human Rights has documented the ‘sweepings’ of olive groves and vegetable farms by the Israeli Army (or, as it prefers to be known, Israeli Defence Force) near the Rafah border, for example, and on either side of the Gush Katif settlement block. Gush Katif is an area of Gaza – about 40 per cent – occupied by a ...”

“... exhibiting a wonderful assemblage of the most picturesque and striking objects, pavilions, lodges, groves, grottoes, lawns, temples, and cascades; porticoes, colonades, and rotundos; adorned with pillars, statues, and painting: the whole illuminated with an infinite number of lamps, disposed in different figures of suns, stars and constellations; the place ...”

“... a Libyan tribe that controlled virtually all trans-Saharan trade. Recent British fieldwork, led by David Mattingly, has demonstrated that this civilisation, in an area where average annual rainfall is less than 10 mm, practised intensive agriculture supported by qanats (locally called foggaras): underground tunnels that tapped an aquifer in the slopes of an ...”

“... to find witnesses. He enjoyed these ‘delightful journeys, motoring through the deciduous golden groves of Schleswig-Holstein’ along empty roads. But this was September 1945! Trevor-Roper’s lofty indifference to a shattered country whose cities lay in ruins, whose people were approaching starvation, and where millions of homeless refugees and ...”

“... and in dozens of places Palestinian tenant farmers had been evicted to make way for Jewish orange groves and agricultural settlements. But the arrival of Jewish capital, technology and medicine, Shavit writes, didn’t just benefit the Jews. He cites a 1936 article by the leader of Rehovot’s orange growers: ‘Never did a colonial project bring so much ...”

“... extraordinarily rendered into the North Circular Road hinterland, was the Deptford percussionist David Aylward. His strident hi-vis disguise, colour co-ordinated with the favours of the London Overground, had been made for a French hunter who wanted to stand out when the bullets were flying in some seasonal avian cull. Aylward was a veteran of pilgrim ...”

“... to eight shillings for the inferior lemons shipped from England. Eventually the Sicilian lemon groves supplied the whole navy. ‘The great thing in all military service is health,’ Nelson wrote, ‘and you will agree with me that it is easier for an officer to keep men healthy than for a physician to cure them.’ By the mid-18th century, typhus and ...”

“... retaliated by shelling the outskirts of Aalma El Chaeb, starting a fire in the fields and olive groves that reached the edge of the town. Hizbullah had started attacking Israeli military positions on 8 October, the day after Hamas militants crossed the Israeli border, killing 1200 people and taking 250 hostage. It declared that the Mujahideen of the Islamic ...”

“... on yet another authentic rejection of Animal Farm by a leading publisher. I had thought that Reg Groves, who worked in the Hampstead bookshop immediately before Orwell and was one of the original ‘Balham succession’, the founders of British Trotskyism, was long dead. His testimony strengthens the view that Orwell’s conversion to socialism was far less ...”