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“... of military tribunals recently disposed of its first case. The defendant was the Australian David Hicks, held at Guantánamo Bay since his capture in Afghanistan in late 2001. For five years it had been said that he had aided the enemy, conspired to wage war crimes, and attempted murder, but when he appeared in court ...”

“... on the grounds that it would retard their plans for the establishment of the Jewish homeland. David Ben-Gurion, the first prime minister of Israel, is quoted in the play as saying: ‘If I knew that it would be possible to save all the children in Germany by bringing them over to England, and only half of them by transporting them to Eretz Israel, then I ...”

“... say the wrong thing to the right person, ‘Or perhaps the other way round,’ Sandy wondered as I held a staunch to his face in the closet bathroom of what he liked to call his ‘atelier’ with its bright blue Pompidou pipes, with its half-glass roof, with a full moon, that night, in a clear sky, and Sandy bearing a pint of blood, at least, crusted to his ...”

“... Jay were both awarded Firsts at Oxford in the Twenties, entered Labour politics in the Thirties, held junior office in the Attlee Government in the Forties, supported Gaitskell in the battles of the Fifties and were appointed to Wilson’s Cabinet in the Sixties. Both served their country and party honourably, faithfully and as selflessly as anyone can ...”

“... It is hardly an odd notion for a man approaching 80, who has held office as Minister of Education, President of the Board of Trade and Paymaster-General, to look back to the beginnings of his public career and to see what he can make of it, at a distance of forty years or more. And nothing could be more natural for any man, after the death of a wife to whom he had been married for 50 years, to turn out a heap of old letters which had been exchanged between them long ago ...”

“... border with Serbia, aimed at preventing Syrian refugees from entering the country. A referendum held the following year asked Hungarians whether they wanted ‘the European Union to be able to mandate the obligatory settlement of non-Hungarian citizens in Hungary even without the approval of the National Assembly’. A huge majority voted ‘No’. The ...”

“... dynamic personal impact of General Sir Alan Brooke in his novel The Military Philosophers. Brooke held positions of critical responsibility and as CIGS was titular head of the Army for the greater part of the Second World War, yet his career and achievements have never been widely appreciated: indeed, the biography under review refers to him as ‘the unknown ...”

“... of the 19th century. The competition to select designs for the Nelson memorial was not held until 1838, and another three decades elapsed before the Trafalgar ensemble was completed with the addition of Landseer’s lions. The first major Wellington statue was placed, King Kong-like, atop Decimus Burton’s arch on Constitution Hill in 1846, but ...”

“... Communists defied the official line from the very start of the Occupation. Whereas de Gaulle held that the nation had resisted as a whole, the PCF stressed the role of the working class, calling itself ‘le parti des 75,000 fusillés’. It hailed the sacrifices of its members, drawing parallels between their heroism and that of the Red Army. Unlike de ...”

“... in their local cafés. Lampedusa loved dogs, Villalonga loved cats. Both men were conservative and held ambiguous views on the Fascist and Falangist movements. Both settled down to write their masterpieces in their late fifties and both had problems with publishers; Lampedusa’s book appeared after his death whereas Villalonga had to pay for the publication ...”

“... Science Fiction. The Rise of the Meritocracy was a sensation of the Fifties, not only because it held up this nightmare vision of a specialist, functionalist society pushed to its logical extreme, but even more because it suggested that our own society works only because it is not efficiently meritocratic, because we do not succeed in putting the right man ...”

“... T-shirts sold, council by-elections fought, leaflets distributed, negotiations with the Liberals held. The draft constitution has been discussed, amended and debated; and then discussed, amended and debated all over again. Huge quantities of time and energy have been spent on the structure of Area Parties, the role of local groups, the desirability or ...”

“... His stylistic strategies appear unsophisticated and imitable, but they derive from a deeply-held aesthetic which only occasionally surfaces in his writing. In his latest collection, Septuagenarian Stew, he declares war on those who ‘prefer their poesy to be/secretive/soft/and/nearly/indecipherable’: we have come from the alleys and the bars and the ...”

“... the rule rather than the exception for his generation), the photogenic and hatless president was held responsible for the death of the industry. Steinberg sometimes strains too hard to give weight to his arguments. At one point, describing how going without a hat could signify masculine vitality, he draws a line ‘from Rousseau to the general hatlessness of ...”

“... is, in every sense, unapproachable and, for the present, inimitable. More might have approved David Hume’s epitaph on utopianism: ‘All plans of government, which suppose great reformation in the manners of mankind, are plainly imaginary. Of this nature, are the Republic of Plato and the Utopia of Sir Thomas More.’ However, for More this would have ...”