“... passion for the hardware of the Second World War, and the podcast he hosts with the comedian Al Murray (We Have Ways of Making You Talk) thrives on enthusiasm for Spitfires and Shermans. In his writing, however, he keeps a tight grip and demonstrates why military technology matters. Lives depended on air superiority, the thickness of tank armour, the US ...”

“... Guardian (21 June) about the latest eruption in the Observer’s boardroom, Lonrho’s spokesman, Paul Spicer, was not concerned to confirm or deny the accuracy of the report: his only response was to warn that a search would be made to discover which of the directors had leaked the information and that the offender would be sacked. That’s the language of ...”

“... spoils the effect by having another heroic character call him ‘the whitest Jew since the Apostle Paul’. A self-referential passage in the same book has someone explaining how to write a mystery novel. You take three images at random – ‘say, an old blind woman spinning in the Western Highlands, a barn in a Norwegian saeter, and a little curiosity shop ...”

“... he himself, though exiled and out of favour through accidents of war, unquestionably belonged. As Paul Cartledge writes in his introduction to Tom Holland’s new translation of Herodotus, the resemblance Thucydides’ merciless analysis of civil war on Corfu bears to Orwell’s reading of totalitarianism, complete with doublespeak, was exploited to some ...”

“... tracks healing the torn paper’. But the poem has a good story to tell – about the visit of Dr Murray to one of his OED contributors, whose home turns out to be Broadmoor – and tells it with chilling assurance, not least in the pacing and line-breaks. Reynolds is learned and laconic and his mind leaps about a bit, a combination which makes some of his ...”

“... them. Anne Morgan, daughter of J.P. Morgan, started the ‘heiress corps’ with her partner, Anne Murray Dike. For many, it was liberating. Women referred to one another by their surnames, as if they were soldiers or schoolboys, or gave each other boyish nicknames – Tommy, Kit. They were no longer criticised for wearing androgynous clothes; indeed, Vita ...”

“... Music of Poetry’), the Gaelic poet Sorley MacLean, European writers including Louis Aragon and Paul Éluard, and Franz Kafka’s former partner Dora Dymant.When the war ended, Edwin was appointed director of the British Institute in Prague. He was much admired there, but Willa (whose Czech was much better than his) felt insecure. ‘I am ugly,’ she ...”

“... Moore sinks to his knees straightaway and prays for a considerable period of time, and Piers Paul Read similarly. Some admiration for this, men who pray in public not uncourageous, though more often met with at Catholic rather than Anglican services. The service is conducted by Father Kit Cunningham who talks about Anna, saying how she had summoned him ...”

“... in fish. Among those promoting the deregulation was Andrew Wheeler, for many years a lobbyist for Murray Energy, the US’s largest coal-mining company. He is now the head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). In his first speech in his new position, Wheeler said: ‘I get frustrated with the media when they report I was a coal lobbyist.’)*It is ...”

“... the communist MPLA guerrillas, just as Singlaub and others – including a young consultant called Paul Manafort – successfully lobbied to get the Reagan administration to back their client, Jonas Savimbi. That the US government would hinder American companies from operating in South Africa, an anti-communist ally, but allow them to work with a communist ...”

“... of Planning Law), have found themselves exposed on this account alone to partisan attack. Murray Hunt has perhaps explained it best, observing in a recent essay that ‘it is a defining characteristic of legal cultures that [their] participants often do not perceive the cultural specificity of their ideas about legal argument.’ In truth we have long ...”

“... D.H. Lawrence of Sons and Lovers, a book he sometimes taught. There, the young Lawrence figure, Paul Morel, long at odds with his father, also feels when his mother dies an irresistible relief from emotional smothering, even though he adored and had tended her. It is symptomatic of Atlas’s uptight, prejudicial feelings about Bellow, and particularly about ...”

“... and symmetrical. It is something made, not random, illimitable scoop. (Twenty years later, Paul Muldoon will take this principle into a teasing panoptical artifice in Why Brownlee Left, Quoof and subsequent books.) There is nothing like Life Studies, and it is, therefore (poetry being poetry, and, Brodsky says, abhorring repetition), infinitely to ...”

“... 3000 of the rapidly produced 1860 second edition – books offered for sale by the publisher John Murray at the same time included 7600 copies of an account of the Arctic explorer Sir John Franklin and 3200 copies of Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help. From 1860 to 1865, the monthly sales of ‘the book that made the modern world’ were less than 30, although a ...”

“... of childbearing age.In 1968, The Population Bomb, a bestseller written by the Stanford professor Paul Ehrlich and his (uncredited) wife, Anne, predicted that there would soon not be enough food to support the human population and that famines in the 1970s would kill hundreds of millions. The only way to prevent this, they said, was strict birth control ...”