“... drama and the Famine horrors as a ‘more important consideration’ than ‘being wholly fair to Charles Trevelyan and the British Treasury’, and this leaves the historian with a number of quibbles – in particular, the leading role assigned to Michael Collins in all the events of 1919-22. Yet on fundamental interpretation Kee is less dogmatic and, above ...”

“... mean to say that we cannot play lots of tricks with the traditional novel. We are doing so, and I hope I have done so myself. There are all sorts of games one can play with it to wake people up. This somewhat cosmetic approach to keeping young occurs elsewhere than in these essays. Thus in the admirable book on Kipling there suddenly comes: ‘We owe great ...”

“... David Welsh asked: ‘How could two such opposed organisations as the ANC and the NP ever hope to reach a constitutional settlement, given their respective histories, their radically different constitutional proposals, and a serious difference of opinion over the mode of drawing up a new constitution?’ Events made things worse. In April ...”

“... The new system will certainly not be as unfair as the old bipartite one since selection (we hope) will not be as ruthless, and the differences in provision between schools not (we hope) so marked. Nor do I believe that the Government would wish to restore such a system. But there is no difference in principle: the ...”

“... obliged us to look again at that decade and treat it on its own terms as a time of achievement and hope. The world did eventually recover economically from the war and by the late 1920s production in most European countries had reached prewar levels. True, the US had failed to join the League of Nations, which Woodrow Wilson had nearly killed himself trying to ...”

“... studies of the prewar world, Florian Illies’s whimsical kaleidoscopic bestseller, 1913, and Charles Emmerson’s magnificent global study, 1913: The World before the Great War, have highlighted the confidence and the intellectual fertility of societies on the threshold of transformative change. MacMillan prefers the Tuchman view. She draws an ...”

“... wit nor Wyatt himself can change the mind of Henry VIII. ‘My head sticks’: that is both a hope and a horror, in that botched beheadings were not uncommon. Thomas Cromwell’s was particularly crude and butcherly. The Tower of London has been partially reconstructed since that day in 1536, and we cannot be sure if Wyatt literally saw Anne’s beheading ...”

“... that forms its own truth condition, as when politicians dispense reassurance to the markets in the hope that what they say will be self-verifying. Creating confidence while ostensibly reporting it is a kind of power, which itself depends on trust. As with the run on Northern Rock, the stratagem fails when people lose grounds for confidence in ...”

“... a Stuart restoration, proposed increasingly desperate and authoritarian compromises in the vain hope of staving it off. Anyone under the impression that Milton’s stirring denunciations of tyranny stem from a democratising spirit should remember that he also wrote these lines for Jesus in Paradise Regained: For what is glory but the blaze of fame, The ...”

“... troops we are bound to break through.’ That same month he recorded a conversation with Colonel Charles à Court Repington, military correspondent of the Times, in which he said that ‘as soon as we were supplied with ample artillery ammunition of high explosive, I thought we could walk through the German lines at several places.’ In March ...”

“... breakaway state of Katanga in the Congo against the UN, and it strongly supported Biafra in the hope of breaking up Nigeria, the dominant Anglophone state in West Africa. Sometimes this almost led to open clashes between the powers. In 1964 a coup against Leon M’ba in Gabon was blamed on the CIA; when French troops intervened to reinstate M’ba, American ...”

“... Essex. 7. 1828, month unknown. Shot at Holme-on-Spalding-Moor, Yorkshire, by the keeper of Lord Charles Stourton. 8. 1840, month unknown. Caught in a state of exhaustion near Marshchapel in North Lincolnshire. 9. 1841, 21 December. Shot at Margate, Kent, by a boy ‘employed in keeping crows’; sold to a dealer for fourpence, then exhibited in Margate ...”

“... a medallion, designed by his best modellers. In this classicised allegory of colonial success, Hope, a young woman in flowing robes, reaches out to Peace with her olive branch, Art with her palette, and Labour, with a sledgehammer over his shoulder. A ship in the background shows the arrival of the colonists while a horn of plenty spills its contents onto ...”

“... judge agreed.AB’s lawyers enlisted me as an expert witness before his appeal was heard in the hope that I’d add weight to their argument on the last of the three grounds, the obstacles to his integration in Jamaica. I’ve been conducting research into the lives of deported people there for several years and have published a book on the subject. Like ...”

“... the club, or the pub, or at some crappy dinner party? On the face of it, no thank you. The faint hope might have been that, in writing directly about himself, the irascible old shag would come over as somewhat, shall we say, cuddlier than his usual public image makes him seem. To any such tender expectations, though, Amis offers here a close-to-gleeful ‘In ...”