“... of European civilisation could more readily be invoked. Rebecca West’s massive and idiosyncratic Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, an emotive cry for the Serbs as the Wehrmacht swept through Yugoslavia, belongs in this tradition. Its greatest representative, however, was the elder Seton-Watson, who not only wrote the first modern histories in English of the ...”

“... in common traditions or public institutions, it looks in established retrospect like a temporary black-out in the growth of the national psyche. Our only republic remains under ban, a historical freak. Rosebery could raise a statue to Cromwell outside Parliament: eighty years later, Benn could not even get him onto a postage-stamp, at a time when Rosa ...”

“... in comics sixty years or so ago and called, I think, a Seebackroscope. It was a small funnel in black Bakelite containing a tilted mirror about the size of a sixpence; this device you were meant to hold to your eye or screw into your eye socket in order to check that you weren’t being followed. It was intended, presumably, as part of the equipment of the ...”

“... V8 Land Rover, lightly armoured – which would travel the road out of Amara in the dark. Sergeant Ian Blackett was in the patrol’s first vehicle and had known Wakefield for five months. There were 14 men in the patrol and Wakefield was one of the most experienced. ‘He was a professional soldier,’ Blackett says. Some soldiers seem not to do much except ...”

“... includes more of the poems that contributed to his early reputation. He remarked in a letter to Ian Parsons, who was to publish his first books, that ‘there is a rather portentous air about compact poems without notes, like a seduction without conversation,’ and of course he wrote notes fairly freely, though claiming to believe that what made them ...”

“... to make the theft secure’. Not that this does him any good: Ungrateful man! But vain thy black design, Th’attempt, and not the deed, thy hand defiled; Preserved by his own charms and spells divine, Safely the gentle Shakespeare slept and smiled. Shakespeare remains untouchable, serenely away with the fairies, an outcome rigged from the start: the ...”

“... Sons: The Story of Iran’s Boy Soldiers, written shortly after the end of the war by a Briton, Ian Brown. I was struck by one account, a basiji’s recollection of his baptism of fire, at the age of 13. After only a month’s training at a camp near Khorramshahr I was sent to the front. When we arrived we all assembled in a field where there must have ...”

“... way down to the beach, where an old ship lay rusted on the rocks. Out in the wilds, death is the black backing on the mirror that allows you to see anything at all.That night Seamus took the country temper back to the city, talking, in company with Marie and us and a lamb stew and a bottle of Montrachet, of Robert Lowell the week before he died. ‘It’s ...”

“... of rebuilding – Sunderland, say, or Portsmouth – get less attention. Birmingham, which, as Ian Nairn pointed out approvingly in the mid-1960s, was transformed beyond recognition in less than a decade, features little, with the exception of the local firm John Madin Design Group. Harwood ends several chapters with terse accounts of what was successful ...”

“... ascent. In July 1933, he married Honor Guinness, daughter of the Second Earl of Iveagh, whose black stuff from the brewery at St James’s Gate in Dublin had made the family enormously rich. In best 18th-century fashion, Channon acquired a fortune, a house in Belgrave Square, a country house at Kelvedon in Essex and a seat in the House of ...”

“... was first coined. Concorde was built to move Princess Margaret, Noël Coward, Grace Kelly and Ian Fleming around the world. It was built to carry them to Barbados for the winter, and to New York to go shopping; to Buenos Aires to watch the polo, and to South Africa to go on safari. Since this pattern of use for air travel was assumed to be a given, the ...”

“... said after Fadime’s death, ‘because I was afraid of fanning the flames of racism.’ Southall Black Sisters, the first group to raise the profile of honour-based violence in this country, have long argued that cultural defences are a tool used by men to justify violence against women. For Radhika Coomaraswamy, the former United Nations special rapporteur ...”

“... IT worker called Alex, putting in a shift before she headed south to the much bombarded Black Sea port city of Mykolaiv to visit her parents. We headed past the colossal steel Motherland statue, a third as tall again as the Statue of Liberty, crossed the Paton Bridge over the Dnieper and hit the dual carriageway to Chernihiv. As we entered the ...”

“... decide the competition between alternative sentences (for example, between ‘red wins’ and ‘black wins’ or between ‘the butler did it’ and ‘the doctor did it’). In such cases, it is easy to run together the fact that the world contains the cause of the sentence being true with the idea that that cause, that state of the world, is itself an ...”

“... would soon reach him. He called his brother at 1.30 and left a message saying there was black smoke everywhere. People could have made for the stairs at that point, but they were told to stay put. And it quickly became evident that some people were trapped. Tall ladders were needed, but they are scarce in Central London and the first one didn’t ...”