“... New Statesman in its various political and intellectual contexts and relates the fortunes of the small-circulation political weekly to the seismic political changes of 1916-29 that virtually destroyed British Liberalism and brought Labour precariously to power. At the same time Smith wants to show that the magazine’s early fortunes can have lessons for ...”

“... as a Kumbaya invitation to join hands for a moral-historical promenade. In reality, as Stephen Ellis was able to show in 2011, Mandela joined the Central Committee of the South African Communist Party in 1960 to help impose the SACP’s strategic choice of armed struggle on a reluctant ANC leadership. Mandela was the first leader of the ANC’s ...”

“... that her words are getting smaller and smaller because her notebook is now almost full – ‘so small that perhaps they are not even legible any more’. The fact that we can no longer read her, in any sense, is felt as a loss in the desolation of which we are all potentially ...”

“... the bust of Guzmán’s father removed from the public garden where it stood and replaced with a small bronze head of Grace Kelly, presumably all that was available at the time. Guzmán and his colleagues decided in their course of the investigation to reverse the Nuremberg principle in relation to middle and low-ranking offenders and to accept superior ...”

“... stops short at the prospect of the victim of a forced marriage living a loveless life on a small country property: Marthe, a recently published historical memoir, gives us the enthralling correspondence deriving from a similar case among provincial notables less than a century ago. It is difficult not to feel, when reading Mme de Beauvoir’s ...”

“... The small dacha in Peredelkino outside Moscow where Boris Pasternak lived for several years and where in 1960 he died is now a museum. It was there that the Writer’s Union representative took us – a group of jet-lagged American journal editors – on the first afternoon of our recent visit. The books and the furniture and the grand piano and the drawings by his father Leonid, all of which had been carted off after Pasternak’s death, when the dacha was unceremoniously assigned to another writer, have been brought back, and the poet who had been expelled by the Writer’s Union in the wake of the publication of Doctor Zhivago, is now given culture’s highest tribute – museumification ...”

“... dump in which (it is implied) mere heterosexuals are content to fret and rot from crib to coffin. Stephen Adams does not propose a general or ‘encompassing’ thesis. Having insisted that methods and messages are diverse and individual, he settles down to record them, beginning with Gore Vidal and ending with Jean Genet. His manner is to give detailed and ...”

“... solid Great-War-period romantic novel. The ethos is that of If winter comes, or The Forsyte Saga. Stephen, the hero/heroine, driven out of her grand ancestral home, joins an ambulance unit, is wounded and gets the Croix de Guerre, and won’t declare her compromising love until she is sure it’s returned. When Mary succumbs she supports her by writing, but ...”

“... saved a local hospital in Hillingdon from closure; the National Federation of Self-Employed and Small Businesses seeking to enforce the taxation of casual print-workers; and a considerable number of private individuals concerned with the legality of official action or inaction. The power of the courts to intervene where an arguable misuse of power affects ...”

“... the bank where Barre looted his golden handshake. The gate to the courtyard is still secured by a small green padlock, fastened by the dutiful manager. The leading USC technical pulls over by a traffic light with its eyes out on stalks, but our vehicle drives through the checkpoint, going north, crunching over cartridges fallen as thickly as leaves. We are by ...”

“... Bobby Sands’, the former MP, who died, aged 27, after fasting for 66 days. In the surprisingly small, fenced enclosure reserved for the IRA’s dead, there were already three names on the plaque that Thomas ‘Bootsie’ Begley, aged 23, would be sharing. It lay to one side of his grave, which was marked by a mound of earth draped with a length of nylon ...”

“... of callings. Wright’s Franklin emerges as the instigator of a dozen projects both great and small, from street lighting in Philadelphia to the treaty of alliance with France that helped the American colonies win independence from Britain. Wright’s Franklin is like Wright’s narrative: tolerant of contradictions and complexity, yet willing to simplify ...”

“... the founders of Alpha 66, 76-year-old Andres Nasario Sargen, had driven me out to the camp in his small Ford. We had set out from Alpha 66’s office in the heart of Cuban Miami accompanied by two of Nasario’s fellow volunteers, including a man named Enrique Acosta who, ironically, sported a Che Guevara beard and beret. Nasario told me that he had been a ...”

“... A father​ is a necessary evil,’ Stephen Dedalus says in Ulysses. In Yeats: The Man and the Masks, Richard Ellmann quoted Ivan Karamazov: ‘Who doesn’t desire his father’s death?’ ‘From the Urals to Donegal,’ Ellmann writes,the theme recurs, in Turgenev, in Samuel Butler, in Gosse. It is especially prominent in Ireland ...”

“... on mortality and immortality. And then there’s the respectable nerdiness of it all. Leslie Stephen, founding editor in the 1880s of the original DNB, hoped that it would turn out to be one of the ‘most amusing’ of books. This remark may have to be interpreted in the light of the fact that Stephen’s own ...”