“... in the dark. The rubies move: they are better, they are beetles.When he entered the university it took Martin a long time to decide on a field of study. There were so many, and all were fascinating. He procrastinated on their outskirts, finding everywhere the same magical spring of vital elixir. He was excited by the viaduct suspended over an alpine ...”

“... woman of ‘tempered complexion’. This last food was advertised as a favourite of the elderly John Caius of Cambridge, who offered vivid proof that you are who you eat: Caius was made ‘so peevish and so full of frets when he suckt one woman froward of condition and of bad diet; and contrariwise so quiet and well, when he suckt another of contrary ...”

“... was editor of the Times in the 1930s: but, at that time, there were other national papers which took a totally different view of, for example, the rising Nazi threat. One need only recall the editorial line taken on this issue by Walker’s own paper, the then Manchester Guardian, by the Observer (still under the old-fashioned imperialist editorship of ...”

“... of them may be counted among the greatest accomplishments of their illustrious authors, but both took on the urgency of the doubts I was harbouring then – a familiar story. One is Dickens’s Great Expectations, an inspired title at once for all the ways human beings try to take the future by storm – by boat or by blood and iron – and, turned ...”

“... names and now meaningless events: Yesterday I introduced James to Mrs Inman; – in the evening John Bridges returned from Goodnestone – and this morn before we had left the Breakfast Table we had a visit from Mr Whitfield, whose object I imagine was principally to thank my Eldest Brother for his assistance. Poor Man! – he has now a little intermission ...”

“... all of these victims were women, children, the elderly, sick or mentally ill, but according to John Laughland in the Spectator, their deaths do not count because most of them are ‘buried in individual not mass graves’. Yet it seems clear to most of us working here that a great deal of violence was inflicted on people in quite small groups. Unprotected ...”

“... 1970s, co-operation turned into an intense struggle over diminishing resources. As the insurgency took root among the prospering peasant tribes of Darfur, the government trained and armed the poorer nomads and formed a militia – the Janjawiid – that became the vanguard of the unfolding counter-insurgency. The worst violence came from the Janjawiid, but ...”

“... economic and social policies which were explosively incompatible and which eventually did for John Major’s Government, and a reckless ‘re-engineering’ of the country’s social structure which ultimately went disastrously wrong for the Tories. She brought into being a middle class which, it turns out, has no overriding loyalty to the Conservative ...”

“... United States; and he fleshed out a new and noble American sense of mission before he reluctantly took his country into the European war. ‘We are provincials no longer,’ he famously declared in his second inaugural address in March 1917. Though still publicly opposed to American intervention in the war, he insisted that ‘our own fortunes as a nation are ...”

“... the fighters they had trained. In the northern Syrian city of Hama, where the worst fighting took place, more than ten thousand were killed, and the city was reduced to rubble. In al-Suri’s bitter appraisal, the Muslim Brothers had shown their true colours. They had left the Combatant Vanguard to do most of the fighting, seeking instead to build ...”

“... is a bit of an old sod.’He is more critical of Donald Davie, saying in a sympathetic letter to John Montague apropos of a bad review that Davie is a ‘grotesquely shrunken silly imitator of Pound’, the receptacle of every other critic’s ‘dud cartridges & empty cases’, ‘the mincy mean know-all kind of little office snot’. His poetry is ‘all ...”

“... to bring about was unprecedented: ‘This claim is upside down. The dangerous change actually took place in the early 1990s, when American policymakers effectively decided to let the rest of the world make our trade policy.’ This ‘crazy experiment’ was itself unprecedented. Its catastrophic results led to Trump’s election, and one of his major ...”

“... the ambiguities and resorts to conventional wisdom. His list of leaders includes Harry Truman and John Kennedy – two presidents who risked war by exacerbating tensions with the Soviet Union. Dallek views FDR from the perspective of a mid-century liberal who has apparently made his peace with the warfare state. As Dallek sees him, FDR, like his cousin ...”

“... and discontents from Europe and North and South America – by the flame of Revolution.It took twenty-four hours to fly to Cuba from Europe in those days, the Iberia Viscount touching down on all the islands in the mid-Atlantic on the way. I had two volumes of the collected works of Thomas Balogh in my luggage, required reading for progressive Latin ...”

“... Early last year,​Jeremy Corbyn and his wife went to Newcastle and took the bus the short distance up the coast to Blyth in Northumberland, to see their old friend, the former Labour MP and miners’ leader Ronnie Campbell, who was gravely ill. It was a private visit by one left-wing insubordinate to another, by a campaigner who tried to re-radicalise Labour to one of his most loyal supporters ...”