“... a war on Iraq are a whiplash to the governments bent on it. They include, in any case, many too young to have been compromised by its precedents. But if the movement is to have staying power, it will have to develop beyond the fixations of the fan club, the politics of the spectacle, the ethics of fright. For war, if it comes, will not be like Vietnam. It ...”

“... of converting between them. Travelling through France just before the Revolution, Arthur Young was distressed at the ‘infinite perplexity of the measures’ used: ‘They differ not only in every province, but in every district and almost every town.’ A quarter of a million distinct units of weights and measures were employed in different parts ...”

“... that make the most exciting showing at the Academy. Though he worked in Scotland as a boy and a young man, and later pioneered the tours of Wales that became such a standby for artists in search of the picturesque and sublime, his real heartland was – at least on the showing of this exhibition – the Home Counties: Windsor, Virginia Water, Luton Hoo, the ...”

“... of character, largely absent from his earlier books, which he struggled with: women, Americans, young people. But the real problem with Sisman’s book is that at a certain point the reader is banished from Cornwell’s life. In 1968, he met Jane Eustace, who worked in publishing as a foreign rights manager. Described as ‘modest and retiring’ but ...”

“... side looked on this with favour. But how could the exchangees have resisted? Not only were they young, they were the only resident foreigners who lived side by side with Russians, making them the envy of diplomats and journalists holed up in foreigners’ compounds. What fascinated the contributors to Adventures in Russian Historical Research was how ...”

“... controversy; ‘’Tis enough if I divide the world,’ he told his apprehensive Yorkshire friend Stephen Croft. This interweaving of life and fiction during Sterne’s last years is a godsend to the literary biographer. Yet there remains a big problem: what to do with all those years of obscurity. Ross’s major predecessor as a Sterne biographer, Arthur ...”

“... that the lines were intended for an unfinished play or written as a lyric to Fanny Brawne, the young woman who did not take Keats’s hand in marriage because of his dismal prospects. Yet even if the fragment has Fanny in view as ‘thou’, ‘thine heart’ and so on, we cannot escape its address. When Keats writes ‘– see, here it is/I hold it ...”

“... on their way to meet it, trembling burn-outs or novices with biro smudges instead of lipstick. One young enthusiast, still notetaking ten minutes in, worked for the Wharf (‘Canary Wharf’s Exclusive Weekly Paper’). Her brief was simple: ‘There’s a lot of politics involved down here. Don’t upset anyone.’ The usual scenario is that critics of the ...”

“... which the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, has ignored. Instead, he is eager to approve a young ultra-right protégé of his, previously rated ‘not qualified’ by the American Bar Association, as a lifetime judge. Although the majority of the one hundred senators are elderly and at risk in such a large gathering, the Capitol’s attending physician ...”

“... and its struggle for independence’. The theatre was packed every night. The message was clear: young men would have to give up everything for Ireland. George Bernard Shaw later said that it was a play ‘which might lead a man to do something foolish’. Lennox Robinson wrote that it ‘made more rebels in Ireland than a thousand political speeches or a ...”

“... featuring the ‘African-American Atheist Rapper Greydon Square’, the ‘self-styled “Walking Stephen Hawking”’. In Manhattan, the Ensemble Theater produced Darwin’s Challenge (‘On his trip aboard the HMS Beagle, Charles Darwin wanders into a cave on Galapagos and finds himself on the set of a 21st-century reality TV show … He gets kicked off in ...”

“... construct. It is now clear that More was not averse to advancement: he was a realist and he had a young family, as well as others, to support. A little earlier than the time that Erasmus was writing, he had already put into words the Tudor image of a villainous Richard III. Though this was not printed either in English or in Latin until after his death, the ...”

“... flame’ they show is self-deprecating, careful to show that it can make nothing happen. Stephen Spender’s ‘political’ poetry of that pre-war time is simpler and more moving, more Russian in instinct, but from the poet’s – or any imaginative writer’s – point of view the problem in the West of taking an attitude to tyranny and terror is ...”

“... of these things was particularly preponderant either in the ‘artisans’ terraces’ that the young Edward Jones was forced to help sweep away in Gospel Oak; the real problem there was surely that a social fabric which, to a degree, ‘worked’ for its inhabitants was being demonised for aesthetic, pecuniary and pseudo-scientific reasons. So it is ...”

“... social encounters in public spaces. This was a turn to a different modernism: the sort embodied in Stephen Dedalus’s definition of God as ‘a shout in the street’; the sort that celebrated spontaneity, improvisation and play. For half a century, Jacobs’s humane perspective has leavened the discourse of urban revitalisation while at the same time ...”