“... finally determine what the poem says.’ ‘This is not to say,’ he adds, ‘that the same man may not be both historical scholar and critic,’ but such a man would be exercising two talents at discrete times rather than combining them in ways that respected the integrity of each. The conclusion (unhappy for many) is that the effects of one’s actions ...”

“... it. The current Polish government has little sympathy for migrants from Muslim countries, and may have relished the chance to portray the country as Europe’s eastern white Christian wall, a spirit amalgam of Sobieski and Piłsudski against the ghosts of Lenin and the Ottomans. Liberal EU opinion, meanwhile, was more unhappy with Lukashenko’s cynical ...”

“... He paused, to impress on her that she was going to have a treat. ‘Perhaps, Miss Marcella, it may be that in your last situation, the house did not have a panic room?’ Marcella put her hand to her mouth. ‘God help them. The family go in together, or one at a time?’ ‘There is capacity for all the family,’ Mr Maddox said. ‘The need ...”

“... the advantage of remaining in coils about the feet of an enemy, no matter how long his artillery may have played on it. The only way to defeat wire entanglement is to lie down and crawl through it or cover it over.The wire referred to here was probably not barbed wire, but the important point is that its use was dependent on availability: it was not taken ...”

“... affected by the terror. I spent two weeks in Chechnya, at the end of April and the beginning of May, and if I had published this report right then, my emphasis would in fact have been on normalisation, on a Chechnya that despite large problems is, overall, doing better than before. The reconstruction is massive and real; as for the terror, none of my ...”

“... end of the sentence. According to Johnson, he was a remarkable instance of ‘how far impudence may carry ignorance’. Taylor himself – my John Taylor – later became oculist to George III, a job he shared with his brother. The post was unpaid and undemanding: though Taylor seems to have been a competent ophthalmologist in his twenties, by the time he ...”

“... finds it less moving than the comparatively stark German work and perhaps the reason for this may be a certain dissatisfaction with Terraine’s approach. Hessler, addressing specialists, cannot be too close to his subject. Terraine, addressing the general public, can. When one has spent years of one’s life reading about U-boats it is no doubt hard to ...”

“... came out the next day all more or less saying the same thing: ‘Mucky Play for Bradford’.17 May. Sitting outside a café in Regent’s Park Road, A. and I see a transvestite striding up the street with a mane of henna’d hair, short skirt and long skinny legs. It’s the legs that give him/her away, scrawny, unfleshed and too nobbly for a ...”

“... to believe Noe, whose motives in telling the story after Stanley had become famous, he says, ‘may have been mercenary’, although ‘there is no evidence’ that the New York Sun ‘paid him for his revelations’. Not entirely happy with this explanation, however, Bierman tries again: ‘More likely he was motivated by personal animus ... the mere fact ...”

“... They have no duty towards a President who has not chosen and cannot remove them. Their motives may be a comfortable life ‘enjoying the great Babylonian hotels’ or else the satisfaction of work well done. They do not see themselves changing the course of history, and need not worry about survival in an election. Roy Jenkins prefaces his European Diary ...”

“... of Britain, or at least of London, in 1990, then one thing is obvious: some of his earlier heroes may have been angry and difficult, but now Uncle Kingsley is telling us he likes it here. For Amis to take as his protagonist a retired librarian, sensitive to the shades of his own and others’ feelings and with a strong sense of proper and improper uses of ...”

“... On 25 May 1851 Dickens wrote no fewer than 11 letters – or perhaps it is better to say that 11 of those he wrote have survived. Several were only a line or two, declining an invitation to a public dinner at the Royal Literary Fund, thanking a theatre manager for the use of the stage for rehearsals of his amateur players, and the like ...”

“... appeasement. But their ‘privileged access’ to the British state was largely closed to them in May 1940 with ‘the final collapse of Chamberlain’s efforts to end the war’, as the authors inaccurately put it. Churchill disliked Scottish Conservatism, and the corporative-regionalist policies followed both by wartime and postwar governments had no place ...”

“... his star’. The star from time to time becomes ‘my daemon’ or ‘my destiny’ and may be presumed to change places with his Muse or his Mistress. But these fanciful romanticisms barely mask the real power behind Powell’s throne: an unshakable confidence in his own abilities, born of application, observation, dedication and natural gifts. His ...”

“... history. It came up with a novel but plausible insight about our ancestors. Laqueur’s argument may not stand the test of time: it was more than tinged with political prejudice about parental choice in education (and in this Thatcherite bias one may detect the first signs of a fatal liking for intellectual glitz rather ...”