“... some form of independence: Sinn Fein won 73 of 105 seats in the General Election of 1918, the last held over the island of Ireland. The prospects for Unionism did not look good. However, by the end of the War of Independence three years later, Carson and Craig had succeeded in keeping six of the nine counties of Ulster out of the new Irish Free State. They did ...”

“... was L’Étoile rose, published in 1978, polemical, didactic and occasionally soupy. The narrator, David, welcomes the arrival of the word ‘gay’ in France from America, comparing it to the dove returning to Noah’s Ark with its message of hope, though he admits it hasn’t quite taken to its new habitat. In the new memoir as well as in L’Étoile rose ...”

“... by a kind of anti-intellectual wisdom, schooled in that harsh world Samuel Johnson endlessly held up to the face of the bon ton: ‘Slow rises worth, by poverty depressed.’ Porter’s 18th century forms a counter-world to conventional evocations of that age. The expression ‘Georgian’ is meant to convey an 18th century with all the sleaze taken ...”

“... with the press, while Harold Wilson could never wholly hide the peculiar fascination which it held for him. His relations with the Lobby ranged from love affair to stormy divorce. James Callaghan lacked Wilson’s flair as a political news editor but took a self-conscious pride in his acquired mastery of the trade’s little tricks. ‘You know the ...”

“... good: the best that could be hoped for was that it would do no harm. The Education Act of 1902 held the field until 1944 and was Balfour’s major legislative achievement. Yet he did not much believe in education, at least for the poorer classes. His interest in the Education Bill was, as Mr Mackay points out, primarily partisan. He acted to help his ...”

“... to produce a tiny tour de force by using three successive auditory analogies then he has held out against it, though the reading brain is likely to supply the sliding scrape of loaded hangers, the jangle of empty ones – the lightness of ‘flick’ suggests wire hangers, whatever Joan Crawford would have had to say about that. (This is not a dressy ...”

“... to the rubbish bin – and so it was a great deal easier, after the failure of the Camp David summit last July, to claim, as Clinton and Barak have done, that the Palestinians were to blame for the impasse, rather than the Israelis, whose position remains that the 1967 territories are not to be returned. The US press has referred again and again to ...”

“... defend their communities turned into licensed bandits and racketeers when they took power in rebel-held enclaves. It wasn’t that reporters were factually incorrect in their descriptions of what they had seen. But the very term ‘war reporter’, though not often used by journalists themselves, helps explain what went wrong. Leaving aside its macho ...”

“... long evangelist’s beard ‘so he wold loke like a catholike’ even if he wasn’t one, and had held his hand in a candle flame to give him a foretaste of what was in store for him if he failed to recant. Many of the victims had the opportunity to go into hiding or, if they had the connections, to flee abroad. Rowland Taylor was a friend of Cranmer and was ...”

“... that proliferate around Gödel’s theorem and its consequences. Incompleteness has been held to show, for example, that there cannot be a Theory of Everything, the so-called holy grail of modern physics. Some philosophers and mathematicians say it proves that minds can’t be modelled by machines, while others argue that they can be modelled but ...”

“... and creative literature (Murdoch) at the other. But the attempt to focus on books which are held to be culturally important and books which are merely adjuncts to practical activity is finally too much. What one ends up with is either so qualified as to be unusable, or so simplified as to embarrass the user. For instance: ‘readers to whom I have ...”

“... smile, the long slits of his eyes narrowed. The effect was not altogether pleasant; his smile held an element of menace. And, right there, precisely when the reader might be tempted to roll her eyes, is a photograph of Cousin Gilbert, the long slits of his eyes narrowed indeed, looking as little pleasant as Gordon said he would and, if one ...”

“... on your Nellie!’ across a letter from Leslie offering to make an introduction.‘To those who held themselves up to be “serious UFO investigators”’, Eghigian writes, Adamski was ‘an outright embarrassment’. But his story has much in common with other, less blatantly bogus accounts. As Eghigian points out, aliens – whether or not they come in ...”

“... the right of East Africans of Asian descent to enter this country despite the fact that they held British passports, while a number of Conservative MPs had opposed the measure. And although most of the comparatively small number of people then actively concerned with racial issues held liberal or socialist views of ...”

“... to make her way. Had she happened to show fear at the time of the earthquake, no one would have held it against her. To step foot in the Travellers Club as a non-male, on the other hand, was a gaffe that couldn’t be allowed to pass. She was ‘politely but firmly shown the door’. For anyone who came of age in Britain during and directly after the ...”