“... and Randolph Quirk) jostle with poets and novelists (including Medbh McGuckian and Amy Tan). David Dabydeen writes ‘On Not Being Milton: Nigger Talk in England Today’, and discusses, in impeccably establishment English, a question that might just as well come under ‘Art’: how does a black writer in English find an authentic voice: what does s/he ...”

“... have to hold my breath for fear of infecting the people who come near me.’ A view shared by David Gascoyne (with whom she was briefly in love, she nearly 40, he not yet 20), who wrote: ‘On the whole, I think her influence on the people she comes in contact with is bad ... There are very few who can stand the dazzling (but how depressing!) light of ...”

“... is reproduced on the dust-jacket of Marvell and Liberty, a collection of essays which, like David Norbrook’s recent Writing the English Republic, chimes with the discontent that a significant percentage of British people now feels about the monarchy. That sense of friendship, of a shared and living republican culture, is present in Melville’s many ...”

“... can be sure Heaney and Longley thought Olson no great thing. Even less expected is a postcard to David Hammond, a singer and TV director and one of Heaney’s closest friends, sent during a stay in California in 1976. The card apparently shows a muscular man h0lding a club and wearing a leopard-skin loincloth; the message on the reverse, readable by any of ...”

“... the efforts of kindly Tommies in winning hearts and minds. Recent studies – for instance, David French’s excellent The British Way in Counter-Insurgency 1945-67 – show that in Malaya, Cyprus, Aden and Kenya British soldiers in fact displayed frequent brutality, often condoned by their officers. In all of Britain’s counterinsurgency ...”

“... of a manifesto by Mark Leonard, the party’s foreign policy wunderkind.2 ‘Imagine a world of peace, prosperity and democracy,’ he enjoins the reader. ‘What I am asking you to imagine is the “New European Century”.’ How will this entrancing prospect come about? ‘Europe represents a synthesis of the energy and freedom that come from liberalism ...”

“... chaos,’ Tempest writes, ‘there was mounting pressure for Pompey to be made dictator to restore peace and order; however, it was a title which stirred chilling memories of the Sullan regime.’ They got round that problem by appointing him sole consul rather than dictator. Brutus, still in Cilicia, wrote an apparently blistering broadside, De Dictatura ...”

“... behind the assassination of her own husband for accepting a power-sharing agreement – the Arusha Peace Agreement signed in August 1993 – with the Tutsi rebel movement? What can you say to someone who’s generally presented by journalists, human rights activists and academics as the engineer of the 1994 extermination campaign? I ask myself a simpler ...”

“... in to the same degree at the same time. As she sews and contemplates the dress a great sense of peace comes over her and the waves of silk become waves of the sea in summer until ‘the whole world seems to be saying “that is all” … fear no more, says the heart … committing its burden to some sea.’ Soothed by the dress and by the self it ...”

“... palace coup in Oman in 1970 and – last but not least – three abortive plots, farmed out to David Stirling and sundry other mercenaries under the initially benevolent eye of Western intelligence services, to overthrow the Gaddafi regime between 1971 and 1973 in an episode known as the Hilton Assignment. At the same time, the story of Libya in 2011 gives ...”

“... rooms); the Battle of Santiago (hosts Chile against Italy in 1962, characterised by the BBC’s David Coleman as ‘the most stupid, appalling, disgusting and disgraceful exhibition of football in the history of the game’); die Wasserschlacht (the water battle) of 1974, when West Germany, the hosts, beat Poland on a waterlogged pitch that nullified the ...”

“... to this book. But ‘instead of a Cold Warrior, I was faced with a man who passionately fought for peace and ruined his health in the process. Instead of a dogmatic ideologue, a heart-throb who loved fast cars and liked to crack jokes.’ A heart-throb? She adds, disarmingly: ‘I will not escape accusations of being something of a Brezhnev apologist.’ She ...”

“... Party stalwarts in various parts of England where the issue of Europe remains charged. David Cameron’s position as leader seems increasingly questioned by sections of his party who want a speedy referendum on whether the UK should remain within the EU, and many of his backbenchers make little distinction between the Council of Europe (and its ...”

“... way, however, from the moral certainties that a good soldier carries with him when keeping the peace to proving responsibility for a massacre in court; such a long way that it seems Stewart may be called to testify by either the prosecution, or the defence, or both. Blaskic’s lawyer will no doubt argue that when his client was appointed commander of ...”

“... masterpiece Waverley, a novel without which not only The Thirty-Nine Steps but also War and Peace could never have been written. It is interesting, though, that a critic so alive to Scott’s exquisite irony and good humour should lack a comparable lightness of touch. The only jokes in Kerrigan’s book are made at the expense of the ...”