“... doubtless argue that this vindicates the study of battles and tactics after all. However that may be, it certainly undermines the Prussian example as a panacea for other countries’ ills. It could be argued, in fact, that Prussia’s ‘success’ in the 18th century owed more to keeping out of wars than joining in them. Between 1713 and 1806 she was ...”

“... a coffee-table adornment, successor to Igor and Vera Stravinsky and A Stravinsky Scrapbook – may look attractive, but its layout in wide double columns with extensive footnotes compounds the difficulty of reading. After certain page-turns one is confronted by four spacious blocks of print, packed with possibly inconsequential matter, and one’s eye ...”

“... The woman was known as Sister Edith, as she was a ‘lay deaconess’ – whatever that may mean. She was attired in a sort of fancy dress, based on the honoured habit of a nun, and wore an adaptation of a nurse’s bonnet, from which her face, described by my brother Osbert as resembling ‘a badly thumbed, over-ripe tomato’, bulged with a ...”

“... romantic world is the creation of absolute fact, so far as language and poetry can make it, which may be the world of enchanted castles and maidens as well as that of minnows and billiard-balls, of lime-trees and water-snakes and an evening sky, ‘with its peculiar tint of yellow green’. But the other world is not a world at all: it is the ‘description ...”

“... and is inevitably preoccupied with the next. The peculiar satisfactions of this frenetic regime may hold an appeal even for busy dons, but an editor in aspic is a contradiction in terms. There is plenty worth publishing about Keynes without scraping the bottom of the filing cabinets of the Economic Journal and what we have been given is enough. The ...”

“... to a splendid theme. The book has already won applause; it will surely be widely read; and it may well establish itself as a classic of literary criticism. Yet I confess that in reading it I was more often irked than thrilled. It would be petty to insist on the occasional shortcomings in scholarship. There certainly are a few odd slips. Aristophanes of ...”

“... Street Station. This terseness could be seen as a mark of embarrassment and I wonder if Feinstein may have felt inhibited by certain pieties. There seems a kind of nihil nisi bonum at work in the novel. Neither family contains a character who is at all sternly dealt with. Cruelty is recorded – old Solomon’s leaving his one faithful child out of his ...”

“... In this sense, the dangers for Twelver Shiism that Kedourie sees in Khomaini’s position may be more apparent than real. Another danger much spoken of by Western commentators is that of the imminent fragmentation of Iran. This prediction owes a great deal to the interpretation of late 19th and early 20th-century Iranian society by Ervand ...”

“... of the ‘centre-right’ move into the new party’s positions of influence and power, there may be trouble in the future. One cannot at the same time praise the Liberals’ achievements in community politics (as many Social Democrats are quite properly doing) and work to fortify in positions of local power those same long-established office-holders whom ...”

“... little measurable influence on sexual orientation in adulthood. Whatever this proves – and it may only prove that the roots of sexual orientation cannot be uncovered by questionnaires – it does not sustain the assertion the authors go on to make: i.e. that homosexuality may be biologically coded. If becoming gay is ...”

“... day, historians will put under the microscope the events of Friday, 2 April 1982. The full truth may never be revealed. Who telephoned whom, to say what? The apparent ephemeralities of that morning may never be identified. What is certain is that within minutes of the news of the Argentinian military aggression in the ...”

“... does not lie there but in birdwatching. In Buchan’s novels there is a nice variant, which we may call the principle of ‘not being really there’ (it recalls T. E. Lawrence to us). Buchan’s heroes tend to be in continual transit between the extremities of the Empire and, faced though you may be with them in a ...”

“... people. For Punch readers it is assumed that Scotland is already pretty familiar, and the stories may have a punch-line. The Encounter stories are more allusive, elliptical, up-market. The first two stories concern illegitimate bairns. One is called ‘South America’: a Scottish engineer goes to that continent, leaving his wife with two children, and seems ...”

“... 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 ...”