“... rings. Welsh doesn’t say who’s calling, but their dealer seems a likely answer. Welsh may yet write the great Edinburgh novel, or we may just get more prequels to ...”

“... mutually hostile zones. To speak, as Sumption does, of an ‘iron curtain’ partitioning France may be an exaggeration, but the geographical, legal, even psychological division of the country, which had always been difficult to unite, was not resolved for a long time. The city of Paris, which looms large throughout Sumption’s narrative, became intolerable ...”

“... When he meets Mustaq, Jamal is wearing the dead man’s wristwatch and Mustaq notices it: ‘This may seem odd to you, but something is making me quite curious,’ he said. ‘Can I see that?’ He wanted to look at my watch. I showed it to him. Suddenly, the past seems about to burst through the smooth surfaces of the present and cause havoc with ...”

“... of Florence is a fake after all, three-quarters Western and not at all royal, while his mother may be imaginary too. It’s no surprise that a novel by Salman Rushdie should finally depend on the transposable beauty of two virtually identical women, nor is it any surprise that the book should take away from its readers the pleasures of credulity on which ...”

“... discovery was made by natives, to which fact the unfortunately mutilated condition of the papyrus may be ascribed. Most of the fractures are recent.’ The Egyptologist Sir Wallis Budge, writing in 1920, remembered that he bought the papyrus ‘at a preposterous price’ from an Egyptian dealer, who said it had been found in a ransacked tomb between the feet ...”

“... the excess carbon in the atmosphere – though the benefits for the mitigation of global warming may be limited and temporary. This strategy might help to buy, at best and other things being equal, a few decades to institute viable alternatives to fossil fuels, before the carbon re-enters the atmosphere through the natural death and decay of the trees in ...”

“... the veneration she received from her own. Stott acknowledges that ‘negative views abound.’ It may have been ‘a matter of no light moment’, as Roberts reverently put it, ‘to bring the memory of Hannah More fairly before the world’ in 1834, but the More of 20th-century historiography was a hate-figure in the Thatcher ...”

“... my sex yet I was simpler then. And so I can’t leave off going in after myself tho’ some day I may. I didn’t know after I left you at Newent I was going to begin to write poetry. This is not really fair to Frost: ‘The Road Not Taken’ doesn’t treat choice as straightforwardly as Thomas claims, and it’s certainly not the hymn to self-reliance that ...”

“... a sense in which Hourani withdrew from that century. Apart from political disappointment, boredom may well have been a factor in his renunciation of active politics. ‘My boredom threshold is low,’ he was fond of remarking. So he moved from politics to political history and, later, from political to social history. He preferred to write about the 18th and ...”

“... every second is underwritten/by an invisible host of dubious connections.’ Ford’s ‘we’ may in this instance reflect Postmodern paranoia; but it also repeats the conventional psychoanalytic doctrine of unconscious motivation; and if the poet succeeds in naming for himself some of his previously unremarked dubious connections, the rest of us can ...”

“... Merridale goes on to say, were ‘overwhelmingly actuated by relief’; and much of her book may be thought of as an examination of this poignant and forbidding paradox. From the ceremony in Sandormokh she takes us back in time to consider the rituals of interment and grief characteristic of the tsarist era, in which Orthodox dogma was inextricably ...”

“... adamant that our own rights should be recognised but cannot accept that the interests of others may on some occasions have to take precedence. If we are victims, we find it difficult to acknowledge that those who stand accused are entitled to safeguards and if we find ourselves in the position of defendant we protest that our prosecution isn’t ...”

“... and her ‘great difficulty’ in stopping ‘my husband in trying to break the bank’. Alfred may also have enjoyed the nightlife, but his main aim must have been to improve his health, or perhaps just to die in a pleasant place. He had spent much of his adult life in Ware Park Sanitorium in Hertfordshire. Nine of his siblings had died of TB, in infancy ...”

“... represents the interests of mining, logging, chemicals and agribusiness. However true it may be that Gore and Bush were the Tweedledum and Tweedledee of corporate America, most Nader supporters would have preferred a different outcome. That they ended up with Bush is another example of a hardy perennial: the historical importance of unintended ...”

“... in Werl and Wittlich; the Americans released the last of their war criminals from Landsberg in May 1958. Rudolf Hess, Albert Speer and Baldur von Schirach remained in Spandau, under joint four-power auspices, and a few individuals continued to be imprisoned by other nations. Herbert Kappler, the former police chief of Rome, briefly made headlines when he ...”