“... sequence of dreary rhyming couplets at the end of his Wars of the Roses tetralogy: while Henry VII may have been as murderous as Richard III, he was nothing like as charming. Francis Bacon was ready to praise Henry’s politic wisdom in the 1622 biography that was to frame perceptions of the king until late in the 20th century, but he could not disguise the ...”

“... taking in the quotidian and cold-blooded details that go into planning a bomb blast. Shockie may be a pudgy delivery man in someone else’s racket, Malik may be an ineffectual and incoherent ideologue, but Mahajan gives them both unexpected dimensions. When​ Mansoor Ahmed stumbles away from the bodies of his ...”

“... who ‘slept while the first reports travelled around the world’ must be far from home. It may be naive now to regard Kennedy’s assassination as a loss of innocence, though it’s still possible to see why it seemed so at the time. The next day, Bill Houston, who’s stationed in the Philippines, goes boar hunting, and for no good reason shoots a ...”

“... from certain perspectives,’ she adds, ‘many of the proverbs discussed in this book may look disturbing, and their messages quite “politically incorrect”. But it would be a regrettably short-sighted reaction to reject or suppress, or even censor those cross-cultural ideas from the past, without further reflection.’ She goes on: ‘It is ...”

“... Agency gladly filled the vacuum, exploiting Palestinian disarray and passivity to the full. In May 1947, the Agency handed a plan, complete with a map, to the UN Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP), proposing the creation of a Jewish state over 80 per cent of Palestine – more or less Israel today without the Occupied Territories. In November 1947 the ...”

“... as ‘art’ or ‘design’, Forty suggests, tongue not totally in cheek, that the right answer may be ‘words’. Nor does he have to delve deep into critical theory or the patter of the schools to sustain that argument. It is enough, in one of many well chosen illustrations that grace his book, to show Ernö Goldfinger barking orders down the ...”

“... trade as an (economic) fundamental value the Court avoids conflicts over fundamental values which may be held in the member states.’ The Court’s defenders would say that it is doing no more than the member states, by signing the Treaty, have themselves agreed should be done. If so, the shift Szyszczak goes on to identify – though hardly ranking as a new ...”

“... of love. ‘I do not think that people want love most,’ he writes in his journal for 12 May 1946: ‘they need the settled reverie, the calm testing and tasting of their past and the world’s past.’ And again (2 February 1947): ‘How almost non-existent is my feeling for other people, especially when I am ill! There they are, doing things for ...”

“... of a woman obliterated and distorted by history: ‘A woman . . . is all reputation, because she may not act. So, even as we do nothing, our reputations grow more impossible, and fragile, and large.’ Enright was once taught writing by Angela Carter at the University of East Anglia, and there’s something of Carter’s sensual, self-fashioning ...”

“... South – he said: ‘That’s it. I’ve just wasted eight years of my life.’ In retrospect, he may think differently; but even then it was possible to do so, or to think that ‘failure’ was too strong a word. When he became leader in 1983 the Party seemed almost down and out; it had won just 209 seats in the election of that year, and in terms of votes ...”

“... like eyes or compasses, a face Of mathematic fixity, spotlight Within whose circumscription we may set All solitudes of love, room for love’s face, Love’s projects green with leaves, Love’s monuments like tombstones on our lives. ‘The Broken Bowl’ typifies the meretricious humourlessness of Merrill’s early poetry. The later work has none of ...”

“... William McKinley was assassinated by an anarchist. After winning a major fight with Congress in May 1908 over increasing the number of US battleships, he led the French Ambassador Jules Jusserand and four other hikers on a strenuous expedition along the Virginia side of the Potomac River. ‘When all were pouring with perspiration,’ Morris ...”

“... rather to have come to terms with that later). However, psychologically interesting as this may be, Booth insists that Brunette Coleman is, ‘just as importantly, a creative amalgam of diverse literary influences’. Such as? Um, the impact of ‘Yeats’s poems spoken by women (“;A Woman Young and Old”) is audible in such poems as ...”

“... most likely to exist in a state which maximises the formation of black holes. This final chapter may be much more wildly speculative than the rest of the book, but these are remarkable and provocative ideas. So how does the research described here fit into the overall picture of modern physics? In numerical terms there are today about a thousand string ...”

“... have in their minds a picture of how the world will be. How they will be in that world. The world may be many different ways for them but there is one world that will never be and that is the world they dream of.’ And this from The Road, the father thinking to himself on a visit to his childhood home: ‘This is where I used to sleep. My cot was against ...”