“... the hermit from the atoll of Suwarrow, made famous by his book, An Island to Myself; Sir Albert Henry, first premier of the Cook Islands, who was being treated for cancer but died of a heart attack; a woman named Joy I met in the Seventies on my first visit to the Cook Islands who died of breast cancer at the age of 35. Danielsson’s only child died of ...”

“... here, watching the brown waves edge up the narrow beach. On the horizon to the south is the power station at Dungeness and beyond it, I imagine, Derek Jarman’s now much visited cottage, trips to it one of the features of the festival. There are three or four ships motionless on the horizon, putting one in mind of Larkin’s ‘To the Sea’, though ...”

“... Even Washington, however, has been slow to come to terms with its intelligence community. Henry Stimson took office as US Secretary of State in 1929 in the firm belief that ‘gentlemen do not read each other’s mail,’ and closed down the State Department’s SIGINT (signals intelligence) agency. The success of the Japanese surprise attack at Pearl ...”

“... some way perceived to be intrinsically harmless. And at this stage she puts one in mind of one of Henry James’s minor characters, Mrs Carrie Donner, who was reported to be ‘wild’. ‘Wild?’ muses James’s surrogate silkily. ‘Why, she’s simply tameness run to seed.’ Not so Dr Tarnower, rich and celebrated physician, and author of The Complete ...”

“... died Woolf remarked, in her diary, not only on his lovability, but on his ‘real understanding power’ as well as his ‘gigantic absorbing power’ as an artist. Reading Woolf’s essay with these things in mind, I do not hear the sounds of upper-class mirth that Carey detects. But I have heard them elsewhere in ...”

“... hundreds of millions from investors, despite warnings from a number of prominent people, including Henry Kissinger and Shirley Temple. We think of a good con artist as someone who is able to present himself as a legitimate and trustworthy businessman, cannily deflecting attention away from the sketchiness of his scheme by various demonstrations of ...”

“... as a returning British ally. His problem lies with his supposed colleague August Walker, played by Henry Cavill. Amazing how secrecy goes to the head of these fellows. The revelation of the depths of the problem – the CIA man closest to the mission is also the man the mission is supposed to defeat – also occurs through the use of a mask and a multiple ...”

“... concluding chapter shows. But his own start has a confident and deceptive obliqueness worthy of Henry James. He opens with lay-out, and with an example of the mismatching of lay-out, tone and content which is the more telling because it plays on what every reader unthinkingly knows: Pamper yourself with the Archduke Trio Go on – put it on ... From ...”

“... this way or cabbages spaced just so.Picture gardens tend to put painters off. In The Tragic Muse Henry James describes the reaction of a young painter called Nick Dormer to a garden of that sort. Nick feels himself ‘catch the smile’ of ‘named and numbered acres’. He appreciates that they have a ‘charm to which he had not perhaps hitherto done ...”

“... particularly those like Poles and Germans who might be suspected of loyalty to an outside power, were targeted; and the socially marginal, like runaway kulaks, horse-thieves and religious sectarians, were rounded up according to regional quotas and, in many cases, shot. The bloodletting, headed by Nikolai Ezhov, the NKVD chief, continued through 1938 ...”

“... Helen Vendler has the power to steal poets and enslave them in her personal canon. For this she is squeezed between rival condescensions: theorists pity her comprehensibility, while in creative writing departments poets denounce her ‘tyranny’, her ‘narrow aesthetic’, her ‘conservatism’. That both writers and academics complain about her is testament to her influence and gentle longevity – she is the most powerful poetry critic in America since Randall Jarrell ...”

“... it a maximum speed of 14 mph. It could run for 13 hours between ten-hour charges from a domestic power supply. The future seemed bright. In 1900 electrical vehicles accounted for 38 per cent of all new vehicle sales in America; noisy (and lethal) steam-powered machines accounted for 40 per cent and smelly gasoline-powered automobiles had a minority 22 per ...”

“... suited to the Dutch temperament, with its ‘prudence, patience and vigilance’, and Frederick Henry, Prince of Orange, Stadholder of the United Provinces from 1625 to 1647 and one of the sons of William the Silent, the hero of the initial 16th-century Dutch revolt, became an excellent siege tactician. On the other hand, siege-map prints, Kunzle writes ...”

“... country through the ‘white heat of technology’. Each event marked, in its way, a decline of power. The first saw the disappearance of a liberal individualist state, governed by a caste of liberal individualist gentlemen. The second ushered in a government that sealed Britain’s withdrawal from Empire with the liquidation of all military commitments ...”

“... the death of Muhammad to the decline of the Ottomans, the most formidable military and economic power in the world was usually Islamic, and the Arabs did a much better job of preserving antique civilisation in the lands they conquered than did the German invaders of the Roman Empire: until the 19th century, it is likely that the incidence of literacy was ...”