“... is neither here nor there,’ he said when Seaman told him what he wanted to do. ‘It is just a little sport and amusement, and leads to nothing.’ His snobbish mother was more indulgent, and at Cambridge he began to race the Riley nine-speed he had acquired for his 18th birthday. In his first race, a hill climb, he came second of two entrants, twenty ...”

“... of Realms of Memory, and the quality of the translation itself isn’t a patch on those done by Arthur Goldhammer, which might lead some to fear we’re being given only leftovers. In fact the riches of Les Lieux de mémoire are so considerable that even after all three of the new English volumes have appeared, approximately a third of the original will ...”

“... to analyse admittedly continuous processes as though they were made up of a series of discrete little steps. The Columbia space shuttle displayed on the world map of Mission Control centre at Houston has its position changed every 20 seconds, even though the facts are that its position changes continuously. For NASA, 20-second digital sampling is adequate ...”

“... although he travels further (geographically, at least) than Murray’s characters. Lord William Arthur Valerian Pommeroy is the hippy aristocrat who, in Nobuko Albery’s Absurd Courage, becomes so fascinated by Oriental thought that he founds a kind of guerrilla priesthood, the World Elsewhere. For him, emulation becomes immolation. Literally. A more ...”

“... hanged on 15 November 1942. While not all the lives Palmier writes about are quite like this, very little space in his enormous compendium is given over to the success stories. Perhaps the luckiest form of desolation was the purely spiritual, the longing for a past homeland experienced at a distance and in conditions of relative ease. More often we read of ...”

“... has been overlaid: in the last two hundred years, all parts of the continent have been renamed. A little over a year ago, two historical items were put on the Memory of the World Register (the list of documentary heritage launched in 1997): James Cook’s journal of the Endeavour, written in his own hand; and the Edward Koiki Mabo Papers, the record of Eddie ...”

“... The genre got off to a cracking start a long time ago with Marion Crawford’s book about the Little Princesses. That really set the standard: ‘Crawfie’, the former governess, got excommunicated, everybody (except the reader) felt betrayed, and the world of the British royals suddenly seemed quite comic. Dozens of volumes followed suit, but some, like ...”

“... should let the new Caucasian republics ‘cut each other’s throats’. The foreign secretary, Arthur Balfour, said he was ‘in favour of that’ so long as ‘Batum, Baku, the railway between them and the pipeline’ were protected.When Baku fell to the Red Army in 1920, Azerbaijan and its oilfields were subsumed into the Soviet Union. The vast resources ...”

“... ventriloquism of an octave.There was, of course, an unofficial Britten, one we choristers knew little about. This one was not the coaxer of communities but perhaps their opponent or dissident. He was the committed pacifist and conscientious objector, the creator of the Sinfonia da Requiem (1940),♪ commissioned and then rejected by the Japanese ...”

“... the imaginary creatures of an author is somehow – well, ‘uncritical’. The fact is, Wall has little time for the Trollope critics. One of the striking features of his book is its thinness of scholarly reference. Trollope and Character is, I guess, the longest work of commentary on the author ever written. It has no bibliography and just twenty terse ...”

“... of the many, not the few – will be merciless on 8 June.’ But then, ten days later, a little jittery: ‘Theresa May needs to up her election game as Labour’s “freebie manifesto” is starting to fool some.’ By 1 June, as the polls skid, there is a discernible note of panic: ‘Theresa May must spell out why voters should choose her – not ...”

“... she wrote in the final song on her debut album.) Subsequently, she mythologised her daughter as ‘Little Green’ (‘call her green for the children who have made her’). The glamour of Mitchell’s words made loss beautiful and forgiveness possible. ‘You’re sad and you’re sorry, but you’re not ashamed/...”

“... there.’ The recognition that the viral surges of anger and hope between 2015 and 2020 have left little in the way of a political legacy has already given rise to some thoughtful historical and theoretical accounts, including Vincent Bevins’s If We Burn, Hannah Proctor’s Burnout and Jäger and Arthur Borriello’s The ...”

“... accusation is unclear. He alludes in a footnote to Berlin’s support for the Vietnam War but says little else about his subjects’ supposed hawkish tendencies. Perhaps he is suggesting, reasonably enough, that some Cold War liberals, in their focus on Soviet wrongdoing, ignored or denied or soft-pedalled crimes committed by the US and its allies. In any ...”

“... helmets as like as not. We know what they did: rape and pillage. Along with the Crusaders, King Arthur and Robin Hood, they form a major part of our medieval imaginary. For fifty years now specialists in Viking studies have been trying to convince us, without much success, that ‘Viking’ is a job description, not an ethnic category, that behind the ...”