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“... that gave it independence. It is thirty years since Western Sahara was overrun by a new set of masters and, despite prolonged attention from the UN, there is no resolution in sight. The key to the difficulty lies in the suggestion that Western Sahara and therefore the Sahrawis are ‘really’ Moroccan by virtue of a history that predates the settling of ...”

“... Was Hugh MacDiarmid a great poet? Was he, as John MacQueen asserts in his Foreword to Catherine Kerrigan’s study, one of ‘the three greatest poets to use English in the 20th century’, the other two being Yeats and Eliot? One can understand MacQueen putting the matter that way, but perhaps it is not the most helpful way when the reputations of Eliot and Yeats are shaking down, in the ordinary process of time, following their immense acclaim ...”

“... a singular ability not to be distracted by the art he didn’t need in order to make his own. His masters were Chardin and Corot; he admired Uccello; his favourite painter was Grünewald – and that was mainly it, for Western art. He hated the Mona Lisa as many did, for its symbolic ascendancy. On a visit to Italy, he declared that he had ‘had it up to ...”

“... depicted the postcolonial black ruling class as swindlers in league with Western neo-imperialist masters, doing peasants and workers out of their land and rights. The theatre was burned down and Ngugi was imprisoned for a year without charge or trial, which convinced him he had been onto something by composing and staging a play in an indigenous ...”

“... Her topic makes most sense when the details of diplomacy are placed in a wider context.In 1836, John Stuart Mill claimed in an essay that Lord Melbourne’s government had become ‘smitten with the epidemic disease of Russophobia’, an irrational panic that had triggered an unnecessary increase in defence spending. ‘Russophobia’ has never quite left ...”

“... too little and too lately known,’ Dryden wrote in a pompous, self-serving poem prefixed to John Oldham’s Remains in Verse and Prose (1684). Oldham had died of smallpox the previous December, at the age of 30, at the house of the Earl of Kingston, a young nobleman who had recently become his patron. He left behind a large body of work, now available ...”

“... of the expedition’s other climbers were British, as was its finance, and its leader, Colonel John Hunt (now Baron Hunt of Lanfair Waterdine and a Knight of the Garter) was on secondment from the British Army. On descending, Ed Hillary, as he is universally known, shouted to his fellow New Zealander George Lowe, another climber of great ...”

“... defendants (the journalists, Crispin Aubrey and Duncan Campbell, and the former signals corporal, John Berry) meditating passing any information to ‘the enemy’ – except (an important qualification) insofar as the British Security Services have always regarded the British public as the enemy. The ABC Trial was intended to be a sensational public show ...”

“... comfort, but a lot of it very attractive. I came to the reviews with no expert knowledge of what John Sutherland calls ‘the fiction industry’ and ‘the reviewing establishment’. His two excellent books, Fiction and the Fiction Industry (1978) and the recently published Best-Sellers *, have helped me greatly.Other People was published on 5 ...”

“... staff. At one level, then, modern Presidential wives pose the same kind of problem as the wives of Masters of Colleges or the wives of diplomats or the wives of royalty do in this country. With the rise of female expectations, all arrangements of this kind have come under strain, since intelligent women are no longer so content to stay in the background or to ...”

“... German interests were on a collision course. As the biographers of Baldwin, Keith Middlemas and John Barnes, observed, ‘the government had awakened to a danger that had nothing to do with any question of marriage.’ Charles Higham quotes an FBI file in Washington: ‘Certain would-be state secrets were passed on to Edward, and when it was found that ...”

“... is part of the authenticating tease (‘real life’ got its own back when later circus-masters developed a habit of giving to ordinary dwarfs the name of Lilliputians). Captain John Biddel, who brought Gulliver back from Lilliput in his ship, was apparently not so scrupulous as Gulliver. According to ...”

“... part because of the insistence on decking out the female form with lashings of drapery. Only a few masters like Braquehais or the painter Degas (if the attribution is correct) are able to breathe life into these conventions derived from the painter’s studio. The turn of the century brings a reversal: the art nude enters its golden age, while the erotic nude ...”

“... education for all’ was the cry, but the educationalists who raised it were masters of abstract windbaggery – a vague secular religion of moral and spiritual uplift. What it came down to in the end was another year at school, with boys learning to bake a cake and girls to mend a fuse: all very well-meaning, but hardly the stuff of a ...”

“... hens and playing with spinning wheels their husbands are not portrayed as blacksmiths. ‘The old masters’, observed the sculptor John Gibson, ‘represented men thinking, and women tranquil – the Greeks the same.’ Certainly it is true that very few women frown in portraits – frowning being the most obvious way of ...”