“... ownership led to a wartime golden age of radio propaganda. The Nazis were quickest off the mark, but other governments soon followed their example; in 1941, Britain’s ‘black radio’ network, under Sefton Delmer, began to broadcast anti-Nazi, anti-war messages in German. That these operations often enjoyed only limited success did nothing to ...”

“... The Jeddah had for some days been taking in water. Now it sprang a heavy leak. The water rose rapidly. The captain and the European officers abandoned the settling and heavily listing ship, taking Seyyid Omar with them, and were picked up by another vessel and taken to Aden, where they told a story of violent passengers and a foundering ship. The ...”

“... when he did appear in Julius Caesar, Forrest played the less intellectual and more show-stopping Mark Antony, but he much preferred those Shakespearean roles which allowed him physically to dominate the stage for a large proportion of the play and then to finish on a spectacular death: roles like Richard III, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and, above ...”

“... moving in front of me. Then I did, and the shock was like stepping on an adder. A clump of heather rose up and stood full height, revealing the figure of a grinning, camouflaged soldier. A platoon of Gurkhas emerged from veils of blaeberry and moss, rifles downwards, to share in the joke. For me, it was an education in the proximate power of the ...”

“... returned and clicked on the second column. Presently a thing like a solid grey-white cauliflower rose until it was a mountain covering all south Manhattan. This is how we bury you. It was the most open atrocity of all time, a simple demonstration written on the sky which everyone in the world was invited to watch. This is how much we hate you. Six thousand ...”

“... or Bill Clinton.’The beards were unimpressed. One of the few beardless men in the audience rose to his feet and addressed the Congressman: ‘Please answer honestly to our worries,’ he said. ‘In Afghanistan we helped you defeat the Red Army. You needed us then and we were very much loyal to you. Now you have abandoned us for India. Mr Clinton ...”

“... the restrictions of what it contained and, resisting all impatient access, leaving the intractable mark of genius on it, in more, and more unforgettable, images than any other novel ever written. Proust aimed at the sublime. His addiction to hyperbole could become a lame – on occasion even an absurd – striving for it: few passages in Western literature ...”

“... anything in the 1990s, yet between 2005 and 2008 prices soared: wheat and maize grown in the US rose by about 130 per cent; so did American soya, which goes mostly to animal feed. Dairy prices shot up (butter by 74 per cent, powdered milk by 69 per cent); the price of chicken went up by two-thirds. A month before the banking meltdown in 2008, ‘food ...”

“... lookMy life hung on her life:I felt it but knew it not.Speechless, I lisped to herAnd rustled the rose garlands:Thus, she awoke from her slumber.She looked at me; with this lookHer life hung on my life,And all about us was Elysium.Central to Klopstock’s poem is the idea of unconsciousness. The young woman, asleep, does not feel the poet bind her with ...”

“... whose parents were born in Bangladesh. ‘No matter how many times you give them information, or mark their card, they still contaminate the bloody recycling bins. They hide all sorts of stuff at the bottom of the organic bins – like machine parts. There’s no telling them.’ He showed me one of the bins outside a large house; it had grass on the top and ...”

“... of Thomas’s ‘infantile egocentricity’ in Llareggub Revisited (1962) represents a high-water mark of Leavisite moralism. Thomas shows ‘an impotence of language belonging to an impotence in living’, Holbrook said, and quoted Grigson’s view with approval: ‘His poetry as near as may be is the poetry of a child, volcanic, and unreasoning.’ These ...”

“... Rakhine in the marketplaces and children had been schooled together. Those checkpoints now mark the limits on movement for Rohingya in surrounding villages, and the towns where they once lived and worked are no longer open to them. Only one adequately equipped hospital in the state will accept them, but they are attended to in segregated wards. This ...”

“... into a pub lunch of ‘two slabs of peat around a conger eel’ (‘Clive was very quick off the mark,’ Heaney drily recalled in an interview with Karl Miller). There is an interesting account of the reception of North in R.F. Foster’s new study, a compact but comprehensive guide to Heaney. Foster is well attuned to the shifting contexts, as one would ...”

“... without upsetting Britain’s prospects on the Cambo oilfield, Jet Zero, the Whitehaven coal mine, Mark Carney’s fantasy-football $130 trillion Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero, and the reported five-hundred-plus fossil-fuel lobbyists in attendance, as well as Claire O’Neill, his predecessor as the COP president, who after Boris Johnson had her ...”

“... in Nocturne. In other works, the descent of the music into a dark and frightening place is felt to mark the structural core: as in the Serenade, for example, which is centred on settings of Blake’s ‘The Sick Rose’ and the spine-chilling Lyke Wake Dirge, or in the War Requiem, where the point of greatest expressive ...”