“... became intense. By 1850 Britton could report that ‘since the commencement of this century, it may be asserted that more has been written and published on the life … of Shakspere, than during the whole of the preceding period between the acting of his first drama and the year 1800.’ Katherine Duncan-Jones, in her brilliant, scholarly and concise ...”

“... And so to Ernest Hemingway, whose adventures recorded by the military historian Nicholas Reynolds may not admit such subtlety. Reynolds is a former curator of the CIA Museum in Washington. Reasonably, the museum is a bit cagey and I am not very familiar with it but, one way and another, the collection has received quite a boost of late. In Hemingway’s ...”

“... Wei is not going to tell us, but he invites us to think that the answer to our question may lie neither in probable history nor in fantasy but in absurdist philosophy or certain modes of detective fiction.The film opens with a quotation in French from Camus’s play Caligula: ‘We don’t understand destiny and that is why I became destiny. I ...”

“... do on the cinema. It’s Disney we should be worried for. To those who argue that all this is as may be but the vast majority of these books are about small wizards staying up past their bedtime or the love affairs of ex-glamour models, one can only say: that’s true. Still, 115,000 different titles are published in Britain each year and – if you leave ...”

“... the police had no conclusive evidence against any of the four by the end of the first week in May, although in law this would not have prevented them from making arrests. On 6 May the Lawrences met Nelson Mandela. Speaking of the police, Doreen Lawrence remarked: ‘They are patronising us and when they do that to me I ...”

“... also a defeat for traditional norms of parliamentary government. This scenario will be repeated in May, when the coalition government puts the proposal to alter the voting system to a referendum: leading Conservatives will be urging people to vote no while remaining bound together with Clegg and his fellow Lib Dems as the coalition pushes the rest of its ...”

“... over the brow of a hill, the sight that has been seen in England since England was a land, and may be seen in England long after the empire has perished and every works in England has ceased to function, for centuries the one eternal sight of England.In fact, at the time Baldwin spoke that heart-stopping sight had not been seen for decades in large parts ...”

“... and forming the Moon from the debris produced by the impact. Collisions between large bodies may also be responsible for altering the rotation of Venus, which takes longer to spin on its axis than it does to orbit the Sun and hence has a day longer than its year; for the surprising density of Mercury, which may once ...”

“... Early​ results matter in politics. The news on the morning of 6 May seemed to confirm a familiar story. Labour had taken two totemic Tory councils, Wandsworth and Westminster, piling on metropolitan voters but failing to ignite the electorate outside the cities. Tory losses were bigger than expected, and by the end of the day looked very bad indeed: the cumulative loss was 485 seats; before the election the Mail had warned that anything over four hundred should be seen as a ‘disaster ...”

“... hatred of the Nazis was greater than his hatred of ‘the English Empire’.* Eliot and MacLean may be seen as poles apart. What they shared was more important. Each was impelled by a duty to his language, by the necessity of modernising its capacities and fighting its insularities; each was to become a cultural figurehead, the quintessential representative ...”

“... identifiable restaurants, doctors and nurses are equally frank and usually entertaining. Wives may, as in this book, be a little too reverential when they write about their husbands. There is, however, some criticism here. Early in their marriage she had grumbled at what seemed excessive hours of work in the lab and got the reply: ‘You have first claim ...”

“... what it means to move to the middle ground, of course. The fabled Republican negative campaigners may have a problem with exploiting it, even so. I can’t see them choosing to emphasise how soft money finances hard politics. In this, as in many issues between the parties, there is a kind of Mutual Assured Destruction which prevents the eruption of ...”

“... In May 1945 I was serving with a battalion of the British Eighth Army in victorious occupation of Gorizia, some thirty miles north of Trieste. We shared the town with a brigade of Yugoslav Partisans, and the relations between us were not good. Our lords and masters had decreed that the Partisans should be, for the time being, in charge of civil administration, while we confined ourselves to military duties ...”

“... and moon being fully predictable, they would determine possible dates. July would be too late, and May too early. That left just four possible days: 5, 6, 19 or 20 June. We worked out the odds on the weather on any one of these four dates conforming to requirements as being 13 to one against. So meteorologically, D-Day was bound to be a gamble against the ...”

“... After all, much domestic life goes unrecorded in letters or even journals. The literary biographer may sometimes have a device for penetrating this silence: he uses the autobiographical subtext of his subject’s books. Richard Holmes gives a perfect illustration of how this may legitimately and convincingly be done through ...”