“... A new history of empire, no longer either triumphalist or cast in the shades of black and white favoured by the post-colonialists, is beginning to be written. It assumes that the metropolis and the colonies were not self-contained realms (as the older ‘imperial history’ often assumed); it recognises that empires were made and ruled by individuals with often very different, even conflicting aspirations ...”

“... the seeds, covering them with more soil, watering them, labelling each pot in waterproof ink on a white plastic tag, crossing each item off the list on the clipboard as the correct number was completed: 40, 50, 60 lines at the end of a day. It was like a dream version of writing: all you had to do was state your fantastical intentions – Leeks (Blue ...”

“... before seen in this country. At times, indeed, it was going up by a thousand a month, which, as Richard Tilt, the director general of the Prison Service, has pointed out, requires a new prison every three weeks to house the intake. If Howard’s Crime (Sentencing) Bill goes through Parliament, it will add between 10,000 and 30,000 prisoners to the present ...”

“... marble sculpture looming above, ‘It was the second worst thing Lincoln ever watched.’Internal White House documents predict three thousand American deaths a day by the end of May. The president tweets: ‘Getting great reviews, finally, for how well we are handling the pandemic.’ He retweets that the Trump Turnberry golf course has been named by Golf ...”

“... most notably the Criminal Injuries Compensation Board, which was set up in 1965 by means of a white paper and was therefore the creation entirely of the executive, and the City Panel on Takeovers and Mergers, a voluntary body forming part of the City of London’s means of self-regulation. The power to review the exercise of the Royal Prerogative was ...”

“... survival, perhaps doomed to be bred out in the long run as savages became civilised, rather like Richard Dawkins’s view of the religion meme? Is that the implication? If so, this is precisely the opposite of the Christian view, especially in the Middle Ages, that shedding tears was the sign of an advanced soul, one which had been pierced by God. This ...”

“... the text specifies), hears melodies that drown out the speech of people near her, and sees tiny white motes that fly all around her, which turn out to be protective angels.As astonishing as Margery’s experiences may be to the modern reader, she was following a familiar script. She knew about the experiences of other mystics, including the celebrity saint ...”

“... call a ‘bibliography’. They get quite excited: ‘The Pothunters. Ten black-and-white illustrations by R. Noel Pocock ... Soon after I estimated The Pothunters at “up to £100” in Collecting Modern First Editions, an American collector offered me $500 for my own copy ... So what is it worth?’ Bibliophiles are like that, always asking ...”

“... anything specific enough – the winner of the 4.30 at Lingfield, say, or whether it will be a white Christmas – for anyone to make practical use of them. Prophets’ profit goes only to themselves. But this is to miss the point. For prophecy is not just foresight: the important thing is not the seeing, but the saying of sooth. Divining the future is a ...”

“... in Great Expectations, whose manifold eccentricities include wearing a wedding dress and only one white shoe. When we learn that this is how she was attired at an emotionally disturbing moment years earlier, do we not consider that a case has been made, without the benefit of controlled enquiry, for the existence of a causal connection between her trauma and ...”

“... of discontent. Still, it was a much better piece than was generally allowed (Clive James and Richard Ingrams making particular fools of themselves) but it wasn’t what viewers had come to expect from me and so was unfamiliar, or too unfamiliar anyway, a little unfamiliarity often an ingredient of success at any rate with critics, as it enables them to ...”

“... with garden peas (Pisum sativum): round or wrinkled seeds; yellow or green seed colour; purple or white flowers. Taking great care to keep his self-fertilising stock as pure as possible, so he could be confident that, for example, the green-seeded peas reliably produced only green seeds and yellow-seeded ones only yellow, he proceeded to hybridise them and ...”

“... German-Jewish boyhood. ‘My Jew-boy’, Nixon was later to call him – at least once on the White House tapes – and it’s clear that many of Kissinger’s traits were acquired early on in Fürth. His family was one of those which did not identify with the opposition in Bavaria, preferring to stress its patriotic character, its past loyalty to the ...”

“... honour containing those – Hélène Carrière d’Encausse, Robert Conquest, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Richard Pipes – who did see the fuse peeping out from the foundations and said as much. Indeed, a whole issue (Spring 1993) of the conservative US journal National Interest was largely devoted to a celebration of the Right’s greater prescience in perceiving ...”

“... sophisticated seekers after the purely indigenous origins of American fiction, as in the work of Richard Poirier (A World Elsewhere) or R.W.B. Lewis (The American Adam). One can see how smoothly Faulkner’s concentration on one obscure corner of Mississippi fits into this regionalist-patriotic pattern. His latest biographer says on his first page: ‘He is ...”