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“... American, originally published in 1955, the insights in which still bite. Greene’s narrator, Thomas Fowler, a cynical British journalist who smokes opium, keeps a teenage Vietnamese mistress named Phuong and sounds like Greene himself, is befriended by Alden Pyle, a quiet young American who is trying to build a Third Force, neither Communist nor ...”

“... in trenches. In Black Garden (2003), his authoritative book on the recent history of the region, Thomas de Waal writes that ‘in untangling the roots of the Karabakh conflict, we should first of all dismiss the idea that this was an “ancient conflict”. Both the form and the content of the Armenia-Azerbaijan dispute date back little more than one hundred ...”

“... whom are basically human (hobbits, dwarfs, the men of Gondor and Rohan), some superhuman in both powers and goodness (elves, wizards, men of royal blood), some superhuman but evil (ringwraiths), some subhuman but sturdy with it (orcs, trolls). There are no monks or monasteries; in fact there is no religious activity on Middle Earth at all.The story begins in ...”

“... drearness’ do as little for him as elsewhere is done for Amis. The critic supposes creative powers of intelligence, once ebbed with Modernism, to be tellingly absent from Larkin’s work. The poet ‘lived in an England of unabashed bleakness, and ... he found ways to write about it’; his address is ‘a sceptical slouch, hands in pockets’; his ...”

“... of the word ‘Erastian’ to portray a clerical estate beaten into submission by the secular powers. The early Elizabethan bishops, far from meekly accepting an unlimited royal supremacy, saw themselves as the heirs of St Ambrose, who by rebuking and humbling emperors had made them willing instrumemts of God’s will. Returning from the exile they had ...”

“... the interior and instinctual lines which connect Eliot’s poetry with the past just as surely as Thomas Hardy’s. But it is part of Davie’s complex intelligence, working in both his poetry and criticism, to display at other times the limitations of such a judgment. Pound as poet, analogous to a brilliant instructor of Eng. Lit., grasps and displays ...”

“... and his playing, as Berry writes, ‘upon widespread suspicions that castrati had hidden powers’. Castrati like Tenducci could move easily and regularly between Italy and England and make and spend legendary amounts of money. They could move close to power. Farinelli, for example, was enticed to Madrid in 1737 ‘to sing away the psychotic ...”

“... and then a senator, and, after his father’s death, had the Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas do the honours when Bush appointed him attorney general. Convinced that calico cats were signs of the devil, he reportedly had his team make sure that the International Court at The Hague had none on its premises. Ashcroft’s peculiar notions reflect the ...”

“... increased sensitivity came from a ‘nervous irritability’ rather than the ‘more delicate powers of discrimination’ which elevated the male. The white hegemony was safe for men, and only men. White men’s acute sensitivity hasn’t, it seems, made them sympathetic surgeons or physicians. The insensitivity of doctors to suffering is a commonplace in ...”

“... of Loyal Britons in an attempt to stop the harmful gossip. As the air-raids began, Haw-Haw’s powers reached their apotheosis. ‘Tonight our bombers will be coming over Stamford Hill,’ one listener remembered him announcing, ‘so you have that pleasure to look forward to.’ In Bradford, it went around that he had referred to the new roof being built ...”

“... region had plenty of liberals, but a category that includes both Miranda – who corresponded with Thomas Paine, participated in the American and French Revolutions and led Venezuela’s break from Spain – and Porfirio Díaz, Mexico’s strongman for around 30 years at the turn of the 20th century, is as volatile as the politics that the term ...”

“... was the 1950s. The Royal Navy was no longer the largest in the world – the two great Cold War powers had overtaken it – but its history as ‘the pre-eminent sea-fighting force of the post-1500 world’, in the words of Christopher McKee, resonated still in school history books, comics and war films (Officer with mug: ‘Cocoa, sir?’ Officer with ...”

“... be president himself one day. So it came to pass. As president, Johnson took advantage of all the powers of office he had done his best to preserve intact. These powers, along with his secretive and manipulative personality, allowed him to drag the country step by step into the Vietnam War. The oversight that might have ...”

“... of 1789, when Fox and Burke were moved, by their desire to see the Prince of Wales exercise the powers of the Crown, to language about the King’s condition neither humane nor Whiggish and forming no part of the grand harmonies of the book’s title. O’Brien makes his case, however; he leaves no doubt that Burke was driven for many years by a genuine ...”

“... was Ayr, ‘wham ne’er a town surpasses’, is authentically and variously present there. His powers of expression are at a high point of development, and are used in a wider variety of ways than they are elsewhere. Yet the epistles have usually been neglected in favour of other aspects of his work, and of conceptions of it which are more or less ...”