“... withdrew, only to appear again at Lisburn barracks, where he identified himself as an intelligence major who had driven all the way from Armagh to Belfast to meet the new recruit. The major, Holroyd reflects in this book, ‘seemed to have no idea of what he was doing or why he was doing it’. These inauspicious early ...”

“... it comes from the heart of the political élite itself. The Commission was instigated by the late John Smith and conducted its work under the auspices and with the assistance of the Institute of Public Policy Research. The Institute also published the important working papers which preceded the Report. The Commission was carefully not tied to the Labour ...”

“... died at the age of 67 on 3 August 1924, the day following the 18th birthday of his younger son, John Conrad, the author of the present book. John’s memories, which reach astonishingly far back into his earliest childhood, begin with his family living in poverty in a tiny cottage, ‘a dark and gloomy place’, at ...”

“... promoted them as a ‘peaceful, silent, deadly’ means of bending a rival’s will. Their first major test came with Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935. The failure of the League of Nations’ sanctions to prevent Mussolini’s occupation of Addis Ababa ruined the League’s reputation as an instrument of collective security. In 1941, Japan attempted to ...”

“... the mouth of a stone lion located (for privacy) behind St Mark’s Cathedral. And, like Venice, a major source of economic strength lies not in Hong Kong’s limited area, or even in its diligent people, but in its role at the hub of a commercial empire – which, in Hong Kong’s case, consists of 50 million Overseas Chinese, reckoned the fourth or fifth ...”

“... links’. These were discussed in various forms by Hume, both James Mill and his son John Stuart Mill, Bain, and most effectively by Hartley. As Jeffrey Gray points out, a major impact of Pavlov’s work was to bring experiments to bear on philosophical notions of mind, rather as the great physicists have, over ...”

“... something more like contempt lurking beneath the surface. We are not weighty figures. No major critic on either side of the Atlantic has yet undertaken a serious study (Malcolm Bradbury’s slender introduction is the nearest approach). Many of Waugh’s English acquaintance have written brief, anecdotal accounts based on their memories of him ...”

“... The Auk, however, has always had his own champions: notably, his two previous biographers, John Connell and Roger Parkinson, and Correlli Barnett, who, in The Desert Generals (1960), went so far as to describe Montgomery’s Alamein as ‘an unnecessary battle’. Now Philip Warner has attempted a reassessment of Auchinleck’s career in the light of ...”

“... software that would enable them to dodge the Great Firewall of China – which blocks almost all major Western news sites and social media outlets – and browse the internet without restrictions. There was some surprise when it turned out that even elite students in China had little interest in finding out what Westerners were thinking. Only 53 per cent of ...”

“... affairs under Donald Trump. The general direction was set in March 2024 by the defence secretary, John Healey, who said Labour’s aim was to restore the British armed forces to their standing before 2010, when they were still fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. From the outset the SDR was the object of a proxy battle between the armed forces and the ...”

“... Although Surrey’s surviving poems can be read in an afternoon, they represent a major achievement for someone whose life was cut short (literally: he was beheaded) at the age of 30. He invented blank verse, as well as the ‘Shakespearean’ form of the sonnet. His poems habitually dwell on isolation: they adopt the voices of Petrarchan lovers brooding on an inner hurt, prisoners lamenting past happiness, or psalmists threatening destruction to their enemies ...”

“... Rubio, another member of the orthodox neoconservative faction who once co-wrote an article with John McCain in the Wall Street Journal claiming that the overthrow of Gaddafi would lead to ‘a democratic and pro-American Libya’. Rubio is preoccupied with schemes to destabilise Cuba, Venezuela and Iran. As late as 2022 he was criticising Trump’s ...”

“... Gear, were the only ones among her critics who got her remotely right. They included Chris Patten, John Patten, William Waldegrave and Tristan Garel-Jones, and were soon to be joined by John Major. In the pamphlet they used as an epigraph a line from Macmillan: ‘We have at least the most important thing of all at the ...”

“... bought off and agitators had difficulty rallying a following, but in the case of each one of five major drainage projects a complete cross-section of the community affected seems to have been mobilised. Sympathy for this opposition extended to local office-holders, resulting in the heavy-handed intervention of the central government. Moreover, resistance to ...”

“... their day. In many respects it wasn’t. The mindless trench warfare during the committee stage of major bills in which the opposition attempted to keep the government up all night is now a thing of the past, thanks in large part to an initiative taken by Tony Blair when he was Labour’s energy spokesman. Faced with a government bill to privatise the ...”