“... his experience of Richard’s animosity and duplicity (others have speculated that the decision may have been taken later, perhaps even in early September). Naturally, given his earlier discussion of the succession issue, Mortimer devotes careful attention to the grounds on which Henry claimed to succeed his cousin and the question of why no reference was ...”

“... What the memoirist remembers, Neruda says, ‘is not the same thing the poet remembers. He may have lived less, but he photographed much more, and he re-creates for us with special attention to detail. The poet gives us a gallery full of ghosts shaken by the fire and darkness of his time.’ Living and photographing here are both metaphorical, and the ...”

“... consciousness of unique worth – so valuable, in fact, that in this new novel Lodge suspects it may be the summum bonum. ‘Consciousness’ – the very term has an inescapably reifying ring to it – is the transcendent truth of the modern liberal age. The novelist is its high priest, and the novel is its scripture. The image of the solitary author ...”

“... a positive feedback, via confidence, into political gains. It all seems too good to be true and may yet turn out to be so. Still, this is a timely moment to ponder these antiquities and curiosities of the exchequer and, remembering Titian, to profit from the Past, not only lest Future conduct go astray but also (let’s admit it) to license gossip and ...”

“... by the liquid refreshments.’ The outing was capped by a White House presentation of Patton; it may have been Nixon’s second screening of the day. Given the frequency with which Nixon watched movies, and what Feeney suggests of his belief in the medium’s magic, his viewing log provides any number of provocative juxtapositions. Nixon screened the ...”

“... handful of letters. The result falls well short of compelling. Although reading this volume may not bear comparison to struggling across no-man’s-land, it is certainly a hard slog. More to the point, as with many of the operations that Haig planned, it comes nowhere near achieving its intended objective. In their introduction, Gary Sheffield and John ...”

“... than to imagine a young American who has lived in Europe and inherits a fortune in America? It may be a matter of genre, and James, in a letter I’ll quote from more fully in a moment, speaks of verisimilitude. But are ghosts more relaxing in any other respect? And we might think the war would have made Europe, even the Europe of the 1820s, harder to ...”

“... with periods of decline in the public school system more generally. Christopher Wordsworth may have been an unworldly incompetent, who was said to have breathed ‘the atmosphere of the Council of Nicaea’ rather than Harrow-on-the-Hill, but his ineptness cannot explain why Westminster’s pupil numbers were also plummeting (from 300 in 1821 to 67 ...”

“... country to ‘strange adventures’. Nowadays the picture seems less clear. Imperial enthusiasm may have militated in favour of the Unionists, but it hardly created a ‘tidal wave’. Their massive majority in seats was based on a much less impressive preponderance of votes, and the same is true of their victory in the so-called ‘Khaki’ election of ...”

“... Other Island), the playwrights listed above wrote about England as if they were English. There may be Irish resonances in Waiting for Godot, but Beckett set it in no man’s land and wrote it in France (and when required to make short trips home to Ireland was subject to depression and illness). Until recently, most great playwrights of Irish origin have ...”

“... himself for all eternity. When Žižek’s psychoanalytic revolutionaries are leaving society they may pass Hardt’s and Negri’s multitude going the other way, for the path of the multitude goes into and through Empire. Hardt and Negri accept that there is a place for refusal and exodus, but complain that ‘refusal in itself (of work, authority, and ...”

“... leaders as a means of shifting the balance of power within their own parties. But whatever Blair may have achieved, Lafontaine ended up both disappointed and frustrated. The Greens simply failed to live up to his hopes: ‘my expectation that the Greens would join me in my effort to keep the coalition on a socio-ecological reform course turned out to be a ...”

“... screamed at my father and fought with him, more than Xanthippe did with Socrates.’ This may be a stereotype masquerading as autobiography (to show that Galen knows what he is talking about in a medical work on the diagnosis and therapy of the passions), but for the historian stereotypes are often more significant than individual lives: ‘A properly ...”

“... Not for the last time, the Western powers ignored Arab public opinion and imposed their will. In May 1920, Britain assumed the League of Nations Mandate to govern a united Iraq within its new borders. Rebellion followed in June. In a display of unanimity that shocked the British, who had trusted the efficacy of Winston Churchill’s formula – ‘dividing ...”

“... long-term dictator of the Dominican Republic, and on the aftermath of his assassination on 30 May 1961. Trujillo, trained as an American marine, had been in power since 1930. He was President more than once, and when he wasn’t he ran the country through a puppet President he nominated. He modernised agriculture and industry, sharpened up the Army, and ...”