“... which Darcy’s interrogators put to him in 14 different ways. But Hoyle suspects that the badges may have been prepared against an abortive rebellion planned for 1534, and there is in fact little or no hard evidence of high-level conspiracy in 1536. Of course Hoyle is not uniquely immune from what he calls the disposition of historians to see the past ...”

“... with an average age of 24, were on board the Windrush when it sailed for England on Empire Day in May 1948. They paid £28 10s. each – the not inconsiderable equivalent of three cows – and were armed with affidavits signed by Justices of the Peace which testified to their good character. There were also eight stowaways on board. In addition to an ...”

“... of historical interpretation: ‘the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes. Voices may reach us from it; but what they say to us is imbued with the obscurity of the matrix out of which they come.’ In Alias Grace – a profoundly disconcerting story of obsession, set in Ontario in the early 19th century, and based on an actual murder case ...”

“... tends to turn up at precisely those moments when we least expect it. Indeed, that we may be most archly self-conscious when we are apparently most forgetful of ourselves. It was his fear that self-consciousness went all the way down – that unselfconsciousness is something we enact, like everything else – that drew Isherwood to Eastern ...”

“... Pillar in 1948. Vidal’s sly mockery of Michiko Kakutani, the paper’s leading book reviewer, may have goaded them into arthritic action. Yet the grumpy reaction to this book is partly – largely? – Vidal’s own fault. He has generated a Gore Glut which even the most skilful wave of Kaplan’s wand could not have whisked away. With the deft, evocative ...”

“... of in a dramatic way. To the end of his days, he had no idea who his father was. Erikson’s name may now ring a bell for very few people, and even they may be surprised to realise that he died only a few years ago. He had by then had a long, long life; his period of renown as psychologist, author and sage could be said to ...”

“... See another country, learn another language: advice as old as the Greeks. In May 1572, a very young man left England, in the words of his passport, ‘for his attaining to the knowledge of foreign languages’, but attached to a diplomatic mission, something more serious than a mere Grand Tour. He was a participant in the often menacing jollifications which accompanied the finalisation of an Anglo-French treaty and a marriage alliance with the house of Navarre ...”

“... few great multinational units in which power will be mainly concentrated. Culturally, these units may best be called civilisations: there are distinctively British, American, Russian and Chinese civilisations, none of which stops short at national boundaries in the old sense.’ He was born too soon to resign himself to Britain becoming a meekly obedient ...”

“... 120 were rounded up in St Petersburg on 5 June, while Degaev was out of town? Between May and September he spent much of his time in Tbilisi, where he met radical officers of the Mingrelian regiment – who were arrested soon after his departure in September. Pipes argues that Degaev became a double agent only after his arrest on 18 December 1882 ...”

“... achievements of our Soviet Union. Fourteen-year-old Nina Lugovskaya wrote this in her diary on 2 May 1933 (Gennady was a classmate). Four years later, the secret police confiscated the diary and arrested its author. When the NKVD men read it, they underlined this passage, along with other heterodox thoughts. Against the new society! Contemptuous of Soviet ...”

“... gas equipment is permitted to travel on the Arctic tundra. The impact of this third feedback loop may already be apparent: measurements from Hawaii’s Mauna Loa Observatory show that atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations increased by 2.08 parts per million in 2002 and by 2.54 ppm in 2003, considerably higher than the 1.50 ppm average of recent ...”

“... or the revelations of his doctor. Biographers have always had a difficult time with Chiang, which may explain why there have been so few of them; Madame Chiang was always much better copy, as we were reminded in her obituaries last year. Early pictures of Chiang at Dr Sun’s side, and as commander of the Whampoa military academy where he built the ...”

“... nationalism. It’s an alarming thought, but a plausible one, that it is Western Europe that may in future be seen as having been the exception. The danger posed by conservative religion, today as in the past, stems from the frequent association of its adherents with social groups that also consider themselves under threat from modernity and whose views ...”

“... what he could bear, the pain he could shrug off, the warmth or comfort he could deny himself. It may be the stuff of a thousand blighted lives and of dozens of novels, but the hurt and amazement come fresh off the page. You may despise the lesson, but you had better learn it; of his adult self, John Burnside tells ...”

“... said in an interview, ‘has business to exist … if there’s a reasonable chance that somebody may have his perceptions rearranged by having read it’. The poem exists as a subversive agent, ‘psychologically, sensuously’. The aim is to produce a dislocative effect. ‘I’m suspicious of poetry which can be embraced by people who are interested in ...”