“... household gadgets to practising law and medicine. Prominent Lebanese Americans like Ralph Nader, Michael DeBakey, William Peter Blatty, Senator James Abourezk and General John Abizaid rarely visited Lebanon itself. As attached as some were to their grandmothers’ cooking and to bits of folklore, they preferred to keep the country at a distance. Anthony ...”

“... chance of controlling Labour. That’s not much of a bargaining position. Is it true that without George Osborne in the Treasury we would now be in the hands of the IMF, as Osborne himself insists? We’ll never know, though the fact that Osborne insists on it is no reason for anyone else to believe it. No doubt a coalition of the losers would have been a ...”

“... of the Good Friday Agreement is marked at the beginning of April. The Clintons, Tony Blair, George Mitchell and Bertie Ahern were all expected to make an appearance. Recently it seemed that a deal was about to be made. May and Varadkar flew in to Belfast on 12 February, ready to welcome it. But it soon became clear that the talks were in deep ...”

“... the hundreds of thousands of deaths in Iraq, but ‘can’t regret the decision to go to war’. George W. Bush was ‘a true idealist’. Even Silvio Berlusconi comes in for praise. Blair did, however, lambast himself for one decision made in office:Freedom of Information. Three harmless words. I look at those words as I write them, and feel like shaking my ...”

“... as an amateur archaeologist he unearthed several Roman items and bought Bell and Beaker bowls from George Bonsor’s dig at Carmona. More controversial was his purchase of the library of Spanish literature amassed by the Marquesado de Jerez de los Caballeros, head of the Andalusian Bibliophile Society. The impact of this transaction was described by the ...”

“... Brigham Young build a temple that still stands. Young sent Miles and his son, Miles P., to St George, Utah, where they built a tabernacle and a temple. Young commanded Miles P. to take more than one wife; he took five. He led the Mormon campaign against anti-polygamy laws, was harassed by marshals, and from time to time sent one or two of his wives into ...”

“... Stortford, the market town where Rhodes grew up and where his father served as vicar of St Michael’s Church. Storey, whose grip on Victorian society is a little weak, sees Rhodes as insecure about his status. He was in fact proud to belong to the middling thrusters who amassed capital, joined professions and garrisoned the expansion of the British ...”

“... spelling, the one he used in his only extant signature – was born in the parish of St George, Canterbury, in February 1564. He was the son of John Marlowe, shoemaker, and Katherine née Arthur, a Dover woman. They had nine children, though only five survived childhood. Christopher was the eldest son, and after the death of his sister Mary in ...”

“... but this one story still retains all its power and its hallucinatory sense of tone and period. Michael De-la-Noy rightly observes that he should have written more, for the story shows it was in this genre and not in longer fictions that his talent possessed real originality. But it was not like him to follow up his own success, even though he and his ...”

“... advantage of being the first in the field. Since he (or rather, his selfless literary executor, Michael Foot) shook off the chains of conventional Cabinet secrecy and got volume one into print, there have been successors. Every minister knew, at the time when all these notebooks and tapes were being compiled round poor old Harold Wilson’s Cabinet ...”

“... that existed in Britain, were outfaced by the orthodox military principles proclaimed by Lord George Murray and accepted by the Jacobite leaders. Dr Wormald’s attack on Mary Queen of Scots must be taken very seriously. The chapter which sets out the reality of Scottish politics and society on the eve of the Queen’s birth is a brilliant piece of ...”

“... start, so criticism has been slow to gather momentum. Even the recent spate of studies – by Michael Kirkham, Stan Smith, and the contributors to Jonathan Barker’s Art of Edward Thomas – seems more fortuitous than co-ordinated. Thomas, as Robert Frost reminded him, ‘knew the worth of [his] bays’. However, it is unwise to die in war when a ...”

“... committed suicide in reaction to bereavement, is too confidently named as a possible guilty man. George Blake is said to have given away the secret tunnel built by the West in Berlin to tap Russian telephones, and to have done so even before it was built, so that in 1954-7 Western Intelligence was groaning under a misinformation mountain. A named senior MI 5 ...”

“... Austen overcomes helplessness, malice and contempt. Fiction had also taken over the sermon. From George Eliot to the present day, bossing the reader about with your own view of things – no longer with the sermon’s universal assumptions – has been the simplest mode of being superior. But of course the form has its own deep ways of compensating for all ...”

“... subject comes up all over the place. Even in élite platoons some sections are better than others. Michael Howard (‘Churchill and the First World War’), F.H. Hinsley (... and the Use of Special Intelligence), R.V. Jones, the happy beam-hunter of 1940 and premier intelligencer thereafter (... and Science), Norman Rose (and Zionism) and Roy Jenkins (the ...”