“... have been smoothed out by anatomical preparation. The glass eyes make them look vacuous. We may be able to guess their age, within a margin of error. Their sex will be apparent. Some organ deformation may give a clue to the cause of death. That’s about all that can be guessed of them in their singularity as social ...”

“... My Baby and Parsons’s previous novel, the ‘publishing sensation’ Man and Boy. Man and Boy may have been ‘universally acclaimed’ but it was clearly not widely read, since reviewers of One for My Baby seem not to have noticed the many features the book shares with its predecessor. Both novels are set in North London. Man and Boy was divided into ...”

“... was in some sense the accommodation they made with each other, and although to an outsider it may look strange, it is not the same as having an unhappy marriage. In any event, Winston, unlike many of his contemporaries – Duff Cooper, Oswald Mosley – seems not to have strayed. Nor did he pursue anything similar to the ambiguous amitié amoureuse of ...”

“... win the next election, had by April swung to a 56-23 majority prophesying a Labour victory. In the May local elections the Tories won just 505 seats to Labour’s 1721, leaving Labour in control of 31 out of 33 metropolitan districts. Thatcher was on the ropes and it was entirely her own fault. At which point the Treasury (Major, Lamont) and the Foreign Office ...”

“... regarded as detritus. Dispersal has cut them off not only from the past, but from the future. They may have some way to go, as detritus, but since the island doesn’t boast a recycling plant, they will remain for the duration what they already are. They constitute the stuff of death rather than the stuff of life. Narrative keeps fresh the capacity for memory ...”

“... has set up a multitude of checkpoints around Baghdad, producing enormous queues of traffic. It may not be enough. When there was an explosion in the Foreign Ministry, just outside the office of the General Council’s interim foreign minister, Hoshyar Zebari, it was first blamed on a rocket-propelled grenade. But it turned out to have been caused by half a ...”

“... separable. Writers – Sir Thomas More, Sir Walter Ralegh, Samuel Daniel, Ben Jonson, Thomas May, John Milton, Andrew Marvell and many more – moved between history and poetry or drama, finding in them complementary means of instilling virtue and wisdom and influencing events. History, which was seen as a branch not only of scholarship but of rhetoric ...”

“... Great Game has been played less energetically to the west of the Caspian but this may change, just as the calculations east of the Caspian are shifting again today. Parallels between Chechnya and Afghanistan are much drawn these days, both in Kremlin security circles and in the mountain redoubts of the south Caucasus – converging ...”

“... Saddam, are able to judge that they ought. Kagan offers an analogy: A man armed only with a knife may decide that a bear prowling the forest is a tolerable danger, inasmuch as the alternative – hunting the bear armed only with a knife – is actually riskier than lying low and hoping the bear never attacks. The same man armed with a rifle, however, will ...”

“... to do with the Enlightenment? According to Brockliss, a great deal. Conventional though Calvet may have been, his correspondence shows that he shared the outlook and principal goals of the philosophes. While he and his correspondents cared more immediately about antiquarianism and natural history, they nonetheless had a serious commitment to freedom of ...”

“... and the soft ‘Sh!’ of the river      That will last for ever. While their arguments may have been temporarily soothed – you can still hear the retort ‘shut up and go to sleep!’ folded into the calm fourth line – the poem ends anxiously: ‘Strange, how we suffer in spite of this!’ It wasn’t strange. Lawrence had demanded that Frieda ...”

“... for One of Ours, and what Cather called ‘love letters’ from young men struck by the September-May romance of A Lost Lady. And she lived, according to some posthumous critics, as a closeted homosexual. Cather had many potential reasons for forbidding publication of her letters. Willa Cather in New Hampshire in 1917. Reading them suggests a more ...”

“... speech, but that we should seek precepts which will help us, utterance of courage and spirit which may at once be turned into facts. We should so learn them that words may become deeds. In Philology James Turner attempts a heroic defence of this misunderstood breed. He argues that philology lies at the heart of all the ...”

“... an embarrassment of empirical riches these days. We have assembled huge datasets, to which experts may devote superlative statistical care. Yet the field hasn’t been overrun by stodgy accountants. Indeed, much of the theoretical activity contributed by professional cosmologists these days looks more bizarre than ever, even absurd. Of course, neither ...”

“... experience of the colonised rather than the colonisers, who have other things on their minds and may be unaware – may even deny – that they are subjugating indigenous peoples (the tangata whenua in New Zealand Maori). In recent history – including the history of historiography – it has been necessary to remind ...”