“... was categorically told ‘by an authority on Irish politics’ that as a foreigner he ‘could not hope to understand the dynamic of Irish nationalism ... there was no sociological, sectarian or class problem or angle in it from beginning to end.’ However, Lenin and Connolly chose to believe that Ireland had to be independent before the workers could rightly ...”

“... night,’ so he tells Arthur, his older son. ‘Maybe one day you’ll have one like it too. I hope you will.’ Arthur nods curtly, more pained than embarrassed. He can’t bear born-again Christians: they don’t even believe the revelations of Charles Darwin. Arthur was out with his girl while Robbie was in his agony ...”

“... between them still persists, and in Nairobi they begin to come together again, this time with the hope of a child at last. It is easy to see that this is a novel on entirely traditional lines. A young woman confronts her destiny, with little to help her but courage and persistence – like any heroine of Charlotte Brontë or George Eliot or Henry James. She ...”

“... this fine biography. Mary Kingsley was the daughter of George Kingsley, the younger brother of Charles. The DNB gallantly falsifies the date of George’s marriage, which was only four days before Mary’s birth. His wife (thought to have been his cook) was a competent businesswoman and, unexpectedly, a good shot with a revolver. Mary learned from her the ...”

“... first of all accepting it.’ This should give pause to those in the post-Communist world who hope that some kind of simple restoration of the old pre-Communist regimes might still be possible, that the heritage of Communism can simply be put in brackets. In France, the Revolutionary tradition died a slow, agonising death between 1789 and 1871, and when ...”

“... to have come through the school in recent years, has described a visit to White Lodge by Prince Charles while she was a pupil there, during which security dogs, nosing around in advance of the royal party, sniffed out her stash of forbidden chocolate. But there are other stories. Classical dance is fixated on youth, on yet to be fulfilled promise; it ...”

“... the puritan tradition. This study by Sheila Kirk and the equally thoughtful photographs by Martin Charles that go with it at last set out the full evidence on which this claim can rest. Webb was 18 and embarking on an obscure apprenticeship in Reading when The Seven Lamps of Architecture came out in 1849. By the time he met Ruskin seven years later, he was a ...”

“... Jesuit Desideri, who wrote about Lhasa in the early 18th century, and, in the 20th century, Sir Charles Bell and Hugh Richardson, British scholars and diplomats who both spoke Tibetan, and two Austrian mountaineers, Heinrich Harrer and Peter Aufschnaiter, who landed there for several years after escaping from British internment in India during World War ...”

“... Gregory Sallust, whose looks and personality were inspired by Tombe), an admiring biography of Charles II, melodramatic science fiction in the vein of Edgar Rice Burroughs, ‘Crime Dossiers’, in which a whodunnit is packaged with manufactured clues – a hair in a cellophane wrapper, a spent match from a hotel. In this prodigal context, Wheatley’s ...”

“... only those writers who rate more than two lines in Overy’s index – of the Eugenics Society’s Charles Blacker, of Vera Brittain, Cyril Burt, G.D.H Cole, Leonard Darwin, G. Lowes Dickinson, E.M. Forster, Edward Glover, J.A. Hobson, Aldous and Julian Huxley, Storm Jameson, Ernest Jones, Sir Arthur Keith, Maynard Keynes, Archbishop Cosmo Lang, Basil Liddell ...”

“... threshold of shame about bodily functions’, to trace the rise of personal autonomy. She follows Charles Taylor, in his great philosophical history Sources of the Self, to elucidate the evolving 18th-century concept of ‘sympathy’. She also devotes a fascinating chapter to changing attitudes towards torture. Here she notes that ‘an almost complete ...”

“... few weeks Brik wins his ‘Susie money’. Flowers, wine and dancing, then sitting by the phone in hope: no wonder Brik blurts out ‘I love you!’ when he hears the good news; he’s so happy he says it to her husband. And, pace Larkin, somewhere – Moldova as it happens – this all becomes rain: ‘The Susie grant required no specific itinerary or ...”

“... the cod fishery on the Grand Banks has been devastating to these townships. Some cling on in the hope that cod will make a comeback as a result of the fishing moratorium which has been in force since 1990. But they still haven’t, unlike the North Sea cod, which returned in 1919 after four years’ disruption to fishing caused by submarine warfare. Nature ...”

“... Wife of the Above’ I drew a childish conclusion that my mother was freckled and sickly. Charles Dickens, Great Expectations A book about the delights and healing effects of reading, recalling the novels about precocious readers and intellectual explorers that many of us grew up with, South Pacific cousin to Anne of Green Gables, Little Women and ...”

“... word ‘last’ in their titles, as with Bulwer-Lytton’s Harold, the Last of the Saxon Kings, Charles Kingsley’s Hereward, the Last of the English and Hebe Weenolsen’s The Last Englishman. Henry Treece broke ranks by calling his Hereward novel Man with a Sword, but Julian Rathbone latterly re-established the pattern with his novel The Last English ...”