“... and it is aware of what other historians are doing. Even so specifically a military historian as John Keegan writes recognisable and impressive social history. The major asset of British historians of war is not so much that they have had experience of the armed forces in combat – many have, but much of the best work comes from writers with civilian ...”

“... not playing it tough enough. At West Ham, it was the assistant manager (and current manager), John Lyall, who supported his guilt feelings – and in Spain, it was, I suggest, the much-praised coach, Don Howe. Much praised by everyone, that is, except Jimmy Greaves, who reminded us of what Howe had done at Arsenal, and left the rest to our own footballing ...”

“... of the property speculator, and slowly the local political establishment – ruled in Southwark by John O’Grady and his hand-picked ‘mafia’ of loyal Bermondsey councillors – began to listen to the siren songs of the speculators whose seductive promises of high rate income, ‘planning gain’, and glamorous architectural gigantisme, led them inexorably ...”

“... been following them lately. For some reason, I have felt guilty about this. Having just read John Moynihan’s The Chelsea Story,5 though, I’m feeling a bit better: it seems that most people feel guilty about Chelsea at one time or another, guilty about not watching them, or guilty about not taking them seriously, or guilty about always half-expecting ...”

“... to doubts or to be put off by setbacks, Ron Smith showed as many sterling qualities as Burton, St John Philby or Thesiger. The extent to which the story is true, however, is another question. There are aspects of Foot’s narrative, from suspiciously un-Arab names (Major Absalom) and geographical howlers (‘Red Sea oil towns’) to serious misrepresentations ...”

“... comrades.And with a frog in her throat she replied– I’m behind you. One hundred per cent.The John Matthews of the poem ends up with a sentence of 15 years. Norma Kitson’s husband, David Kitson, was sentenced to 20 years for work connected with the early days of the ANC. Like Dulcie, she was a hundred per cent behind him and remained so. Her spirit is ...”

“... traditional community of young Polish Jews. The last chapter, set just before a picture of Pope John Paul II praying at the Heroes of the Ghetto Monument in Warsaw, carries an interview with Szymon Datner PhD, vice-president of the Jewish Historical Institute of Poland and the author of 15 books on German crimes in Poland and the fate of the Jews. He calls ...”

“... ability to see faces enables us to see faces in all sorts of things: this is catalogued in John Michell’s Simulacra (1979), which has 196 illustrations of faces in trees, stones, vegetables and animals. In a visual pun, seeing things in things is incorporated with the game that we play, as we sit at our desks, of lining things up, making that ...”

“... Continental Drift, Bob Dubois dies of stab wounds on a Miami side street. That novel won the 1985 John Dos Passos Prize and was nominated for the Pulitzer. The road not taken isn’t pretty, but there’s a lot of mileage in it. ‘This is not Bambi territory,’ a lawyer says in The Sweet Hereafter, the story of a small town convulsed when a school bus ...”

“... all, and she escapes as the tyrant is overwhelmed by his own mutinous verbiage. Earlier this year John Mullan wrote an article proposing that the essential difference between ‘literary fiction’ and ‘genre fiction’ is that only ‘literary’ novels ‘ask us to attend to the manner of their telling’. The implication is that genre fiction with ...”

“... like Ralph Nader, Michael DeBakey, William Peter Blatty, Senator James Abourezk and General John Abizaid rarely visited Lebanon itself. As attached as some were to their grandmothers’ cooking and to bits of folklore, they preferred to keep the country at a distance. Anthony Shadid was an exception. As he wrote in this account of his struggle to ...”

“... were excitedly vulnerable to the charms of fame and what came with it, and the men – who, as John Peel (not obviously an abusive monster) said, ‘didn’t ask for ID’ – took their tribute in sexual encounters without concerning themselves with the age of those they were exploiting. Another tweet caught my attention, in the timeline of ...”

“... Strikes in Glasgow, some notable acts of sedition, a riot in the town centre and the careers of John Maclean, James Maxton and the Red Clydesiders, ‘not one of the radicals of that era is represented among the statues of George Square.’ The riot caused the army to scramble its tanks (the only such time on mainland Britain) and to position snipers on the ...”

“... flight by hydrogen balloon in 1783 as ‘a sort of physical rapture’, and the American pioneer John Wise insisted that the experience ‘never fails to produce exhilaration … the mind is illuminated.’ Yet what goes up must come down: ballooning’s Achilles’ heel, the impossibility of setting one’s direction of travel, means that even the most ...”

“... of Amaral’s colourised photographs, this time of Lewis Powell, one of the men who conspired with John Wilkes Booth to assassinate Lincoln, and who on the same night made a savage attempt on the life of his secretary of state, William H. Seward. The shoppers were asked when they thought it had been taken. Powell is leaning against the pocked metal of his cell ...”