“... risky plan wasn’t without safeguards, but they were all ignored. The bureau’s director, Stephen Higgins, stressed beforehand that surprise was essential. If there was reason to believe that the Davidians knew about the raid, or if they changed their routines in any meaningful way in the days leading up to it, the agents were supposed to call off the ...”

“... auctioneer in County Leitrim. McKiernan, in the novel, has overseen Ruttledge’s purchase of his small house and farm. McGirl must have done as much for McGahern, who mentions him in a letter to a friend as ‘the one I dealt with, more interested in machine guns than in coffins’. In the novel, when McKiernan asks, ‘You don’t seem to have any interest ...”

“... The sources of inspiration begin in 1920s Berlin and end in the Costa del Sol. The passage is a small masterpiece of architectural criticism, exact in its judgments and surprising in its choices. Berthold Lubetkin’s Highpoint flats (1935-38) They aren’t always so subtle, or so dispassionate. In one of the few judgments cut from later ...”

“... and theoretician of constitutional monarchy, but his liberalism is not so easily categorised, as Stephen Holmes noted in his fine Benjamin Constant and the Making of Modern Liberalism. It was, not simply a vision of the laissez-faire state guaranteeing the French bourgeoisie the right to get rich – as François Guizot was famously to propose during the ...”

“... ghosts through, the instigators of riot.Single button strategically undone at the throat of the small-check Ben Shermans, slippery bomber jacket zipped to the V, No 1 crop eliding to suedehead: the performance of a performance. Stewart Home rampaging from the cover of No Pity. The tasty venue? ‘Upstairs at the Garage’, an evening of sponsored ...”

“... He mentions in the Preface to this edition that he was led by Cyril Connolly to take down the small talk of the great, but was essentially writing ‘to put a fence around my experience. In doing so I discovered an alter ego of which I am not especially fond but which, being opposed to capital punishment, I could not put to death.’ It is a cryptic ...”

“... of them to alter their middle-class character. It was the policy of the cuckoo in the nest. A small number of middle-class boys had first been allowed to share in the endowments made for the poor early in the 19th century. By the 1870s there was a powerful ‘reform’ movement pressing for the new type of school. Some of the hospitals, notably ...”

“... of chemical or biological weapons. 5. Iraq is a dictatorship in a class of its own, or a very small set that includes North Korea, for violation of human rights. 6. In consequence, Iraq cannot be accorded the rights of a sovereign state, but must submit to blockade, bombing and loss of territorial integrity, until the international community decides ...”

“... mother Bertha was a cultivated woman, who had acted in Yiddish theatre. She died when Chester was small, his father remarried, and the boy was largely brought up by his grandmother. His grandmother’s name was Bobby. His stepmother’s name was Syd. (In their choice of names the Americans have always been more eclectic than we are: a girl in Dynasty, for ...”

“... But the danger lies not so much within the population as a whole, where religious extremists are a small minority (more confessional votes are cast in Israel than Pakistan), as within the Army. Officers and other ranks who have worked with the Taliban in Afghanistan and the Lashkar-i-Tayyaba in Kashmir have become infected with zealotry. At the same time ...”

“... monologues (Helen Baxendale as a servant girl, Joss Ackland as Barabbas) was also consigned to the small hours: ‘It was felt that because these dramas are considered, thoughtful pieces, they suit the later evening slots when the audience has time to sit and enjoy them.’ At the same time, paradoxically, the BBC’s public service remit seriously restricted ...”

“... gourmet inmate took delivery of new potatoes from a prison officer and finding them a touch too small, threw the lot in the officer’s face. In January 1994 the Home Secretary received a protest from a visitor to the prison, Lady Olga Maitland, about these shenanigans. ‘Lady Olga didn’t mention security,’ he observed. ‘She didn’t mention any of ...”

“... only to divide and reassemble in Capri or San Francisco the next. (The peripatetic paradigm is Sir Stephen Spender, but Macdonald made an effort to run him close.) Third, he was an adopter of causes and had a pronounced tendency to look for the orphaned ones. If a thing was already sayable, he would be that much less interested in defending its right to be ...”

“... political and social upheavals of a wholly unparalleled kind. It is on this theme that Stephen Blakemore focuses his attention. Burke and the Fall of Language concentrates on the writer who was more aware than anyone – other than his mortal enemy Rousseau – of the extent to which politics is not just described but actually constituted by the ...”

“... in the bath with baby Jesus; a man in a Windsor carving playing ‘horsey’ with a small child; and William the Marshal, handed over as a hostage by his father at the age of six and then subject to execution when his father reneged, peacefully playing what I would call ‘bulliers’ with King Stephen, who ...”