“... while serving as a British government envoy. What he gave Kazakhstan in return for this largesse may yet emerge, but let us not forget that the president in question, Nursultan Nazarbayev, was a dictator whose regime tortured opponents and whose security forces opened fire on striking oil workers on 16 December 2011, killing fifteen people and injuring a ...”

“... and the epilogue is placed at the front of the book, before the main text even begins. This may be a Lutyens-like joke: but such lack of concern for proportion and arrangement seems peculiarly out of place, given the subject of the book. Most of the dwellings described here were not so much country houses as houses in the country: rustic retreats for ...”

“... underground, now legalised and enjoying a considerable implantation. Whatever concessions Carrillo may wish to make to Suarez’s succession in the way of moderated class politics, the base of the PCE in a restive and robust industrial working class will limit any dilution of economic militancy. The pact of Moncloa could not prevent the Spanish proletariat ...”

“... of the family worried about propriety and suppressed unflattering information. Sometimes we may forgive them. Arnold’s wife Fanny Lucy (‘Flu’) struck out all favourable references to herself – exactly why? At other times we encounter outright lies or convenient omissions. Matthew skipped out on his sister Jane’s wedding to William Forster of ...”

“... ruling principle’ of events ‘for Joyce, as for Schopenhauer and Nietzsche’ – but Martin may be referring to Gus Nietzsche, since Schopie Boy turns out to be called Arnold. Where there is a critical problem – like Lawrence’s confused use of Wagner in Women in Love – Martin remembers other appointments. But then anybody who can say that Wagner ...”

“... it. France and the USSR followed suit. Britain held out for an executive solution until the end of May: but in April, by appointing Justice Robert Jackson of the Supreme Court chief US prosecutor, Truman made it plain that there would be a trial even if Britain took no part. Nazi Germany having ceased to exist, delegations from the US, the USSR, Britain and ...”

“... has developed, beginning with the founding Constitution and the Bill of Rights, the form of which may have been influenced by the 1729 English translation of the Tractatus that was in Benjamin Franklin’s library, a collection used for reference by the framers of the Constitution. Spinoza’s prospectus for a post-Jewish and post-Christian world was part of ...”

“... forty years ago, Achebe has spoken and written so incessantly about his life and work that we may well feel that he has already done the work of the biographer. Should he now decide to publish his memoirs or autobiography all they could add to our knowledge of him and his cultural background would be some intimate revelations about those fluctuations of ...”

“... There was something unsettling about the serried ranks of New Labour women elected on 1 May last year. All those structured smiles and cheerful jackets gathered round our leader made me feel like a bad-tempered Daily Mail reader or one of those glorious man-hating feminists of myth who live in Hackney and refuse to shave their legs ...”

“... Put on the kettle and make the tay, and if they weren’t happy, that you may. By the time he wrote this, O’Malley knew all about post-revolutionary disillusionment. He went on to produce a sequel, The Singing Flame, which is less accomplished but possesses much of the same drive and power. Always a stringent self-critic, he ...”

“... For the first time I’m nervous flying to Belfast. It’s early morning, Friday 22 May, and radio reports tell of streams of voters heading to the polls. As I buy the Irish Times at the newstand in Terminal One, I catch sight of one of my graduate students – we nod and smile quickly. He’s flying to Cork to vote Yes ...”

“... Hugh Dalton observed that no good book ever got written between division bells. Crosland may have benefited from an enforced sabbatical. The Future of Socialism is not an academic study, however. The energy it conveys comes from the sense of its author as somebody recently bloodied in battle, waiting for the next push. Nor should Crosland be seen as ...”

“... literary history, often based on biography, is too credulous, and that writers and their advocates may have interests in lying. It can’t replace Lockhart or Johnson as a detailed biographical record (it’s a fraction of the length of either), but can and does target the ways in which they and their kind deceive. Rather like saints’ lives, to which they ...”

“... I spent ten days in May in Russia on a visit arranged by the Great Britain-USSR Society. My colleagues were the novelists Paul Bailey, Christopher Hope and Timothy Mo (who also writes for Boxing News), the poet Craig Raine (who doesn’t) and the playwright Sue Townsend of Adrian Mole fame. I had many misgivings about the trip, particularly in regard to creature comforts ...”

“... the last week of the campaign. This generous profusion was certainly good for the press – it may even have helped the Independent to turn the corner financially – but it is unlikely to have had much effect on the election result. A study of the 1983 General Election showed that, according to the voters themselves, press advertising was the form of ...”