“... one case,’ he said, ‘whether it’s here’ – he meant Garvaghy Road – ‘or the murder of Robert Hamill, or whatever. I think it was the cumulative effect of all the cases. I think it was the fact that she had taken a number of cases very successfully against the RUC. We said away last year that Rosemary needed protection and she was never given ...”

“... things he wished he could do – ‘a dozen Chekhov-Shakespeare novels’, as one of his editors, Robert Phelps, summarised a characteristic resolution; a life of Jesus; a novel about the atom bomb – were to become an almost public constituent of his writing life. His criticism is marked by the same mixture of yearning and disappointed hopes. Agee’s ...”

“... The hospital promotes itself as ‘a centre of orthopaedic excellence’. National Health Service hospitals have to promote themselves these days. Earlier this year it survived a brush with closure. It’s neat and scrubbed and slightly worn at the edges, unable to justify to itself that few per cent of the budget the private sector sets aside for ...”

“... vaguer charges of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. It remains possible that Robert Mueller, a former FBI director who has been appointed to investigate these allegations, may turn up some compelling evidence of contacts between Trump’s people and various Russians. It would be surprising if an experienced prosecutor empowered to cast a ...”

“... were in there all the time and this really hurts us, too.’ Kristina was still thinking about Robert L. ‘I can’t believe I offered that man a drink. I’m an idiot.’ He looked pained. I said: ‘That’s actually what they told us to do earlier. Offer something to drink. It’s OK.’ It occurred to me that the question ‘Can I bring you something ...”

“... at the church across the square and she overheard them at a nearby table fumbling for a line of Robert Browning’s ‘The Lost Mistress’:Tomorrow we meet the same then, dearest?May I take your hand in mine?Mere friends are we – well, friends the merestKeep much that I resign …Yet I will but say what mere friends say,Or only a thought stronger;I will ...”

“... concerned – one of the lightest-fingered authors living). In this case, the borrowings are from Robert Aldrich’s Whatever happened to Baby Jane? and John Fowles’s The Collector. A best-selling author, Paul Sheldon, crashes in a desolate area of the Rockies. It is winter, his car is buried in the snow, and his broken body is rescued by an eccentric ...”

“... many people left accounts of what she said and did; but it also meant, as her previous biographer, Robert Halsband, has demonstrated, that dubious anecdotes had a habit of attaching themselves to her. Though Grundy attempts to solve the problem of naming by reserving ‘Montagu’ for the literary career and ‘Lady Mary’ for the rest, the variousness of her ...”

“... possession of them and then they lose their appetites and get ill.’ Only the ‘robust, hardy’ Robert, older than Jack, and two years younger than Lolly, is never attacked. ‘Bobby has sensibility,’ his father wrote, ‘will love ideas and have enthusiasms, ardours, and will go through more emotional experiences in a month than another in ten ...”

“... political history had three main concerns: the working of particular institutions (cabinet, civil service, press etc), the electoral activities of political parties, and the lives of politicians. One might have hoped for some change in this pattern over the last sixty years, but all three approaches are still pottering along. The first two appeal to the ...”

“... Cripplegate, he seems to have placed rails round the altar and introduced a monthly communion service. During his incumbency, consumption of communion wine doubled, an indication of the increased frequency of communion services, and perhaps of increased attendance at them. In Elizabethan and Jacobean England, these were all highly contentious matters, and ...”

“... then got left over.’ As it happens, Kay spent the war working for the London Auxiliary Ambulance Service, pulling out the dead and the injured from under buildings, driving an old grey van by night through broken, burning streets; but that isn’t the whole of her story. She’s also a 1940s version of the woebegone lover last seen so horribly keening ...”

“... trumpetts will greatly disturbe and hinder both the ministers and parishioners in tyme of devine service and sermons. Having run through the familiar tropes of anti-theatrical rhetoric – the throngs of riffraff, the opportunities for crime, the dangers of infection, the drums and trumpets drowning out godly sermons – the petitioners entreat the ...”

“... return. The demands of courtship were changed irrevocably by the rise of letter-writing. As Robert Darnton has argued, ‘living cannot be distinguished from reading, nor loving from the writing of love letters.’ Today, extramarital affairs are most likely to be discovered by reading a partner’s emails or texts. In fact, having an affair and using ...”

“... war on terror and the war in Iraq. Beyond all this he rejects the repudiation of history in the service of a faith-based future. While Dower’s instances of these failures are historically specific, the failures themselves are not. One could map much of what he rails against onto the ‘idols of the human mind’ that Francis Bacon identified in The ...”