“... like an Icelandic version of that cultural bravado which is the other half of cultural cringe: one may doubt whether the kings of Norway really took as much notice of Icelandic wanderers as the sagas say they do. Nor are the sagas, for the most part, very concerned about these foreign exploits. The Viking Age had little impact on them. In the 10th and 11th ...”

“... always committing yourself to concrete solutions – knows that the man from Reclaim The Streets may have been wise not to answer questions. Ultimately, though, for Lloyd the anti-capitalists’ tactical strengths are also moral weaknesses. Their energy and theatricality and political nimbleness are all substitutes for the more patient, more democratic ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the garden should occupy some seventy acres, though he concedes that ‘some thing very princely may be contrived in thirty akers; allways supposing it be exquisitely kept.’ It will be surrounded by a wall of brick or stone, two feet wide and 13 feet high. There will be a huge staff of under-gardeners, masons, carpenters, labourers and odd-job men. In ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... On 20 May, in a stuffy hall inside Baghdad’s Green Zone, behind the seven lines of sandbagged checkpoints, razor wire and sniffer dogs that protect it from the streets beyond, a new Iraqi cabinet was voted into office. Five months after they elected their parliament, Iraqis finally had a new government. This government included a minister for tourism but, despite the war raging across the country, no minister of the interior or of defence: Shia and Sunni leaders were still arguing over who should control those jobs ...”

“... Reinhard Heydrich, architect of the Final Solution and Himmler’s deputy, shaking hands in May 1942 with Darquier de Pellepoix, charged by the German occupiers and the Vichy government with delivering France’s quota of Jews for deportation. The name was familiar. Between 1963 and 1970, she had been treated three times a week by a psychoanalyst named ...”

“... to the agents of the state to search the premises of anyone at all on whom their suspicions ‘may chance to fall’: the new all-premises warrants are general warrants in a rather different sense. They specify the suspects, but not the premises, and they permit multiple searches of those unspecified premises. They seem intended to permit fishing ...”

“... because they happen to annoy him: ‘Strengthen me, I pray thee, only this once, O God, that I may be at once avenged of the Philistines for my two eyes.’ God seems to have forgiven the Hebrews again so he obliges Samson and ‘the dead which he slew at his death were more than they which he slew in his life.’ An unintended national liberation on ...”

“... Cretan Muslims were packed off to Turkish ports in whose back streets the Cretan dialect may still be heard today. Turkish-speaking Christians settled in Greece, with the result that the demand for Turkish-language music and films boomed, remaining strong in Athens and Thessaloniki well into the 1950s. The Muslims of western Thrace were exempted ...”

“... it is utopian. I mean only that it is a cluster of principles from which isolated departures may be inevitable even in a decent regime, but substantial and committed compliance with which is one key determinant of a regime’s decency. The most basic principle is this: when we live under the rule of law, the agents of the state are legally and publicly ...”

“... a novel like this would stream out of a 13-year-old’s pen isn’t convincing, however: Mitchell may work fast – he’s had four novels published in seven years – but that doesn’t mean the prose splurges out. The supposed naturalism of Jason’s voice is highly artificial, and making romantic claims for its authenticity puts it under more strain than ...”

“... alive in the fire of his astounding music.’ Even when Prokofiev slipped out of Petrograd in May 1918 on what turned out to be the last Trans-Siberian Express to reach Vladivostok, his plan was for a half-year US tour, after which he would return home. That the six months would turn into nine years was perhaps foreseeable, but it certainly was not – by ...”

“... it came out just ten days before the catastrophic defeat of Union forces at Bull Run – but there may have been other reasons, for this sceptical tale makes uncomfortable reading. It is the story of two sisters’ entanglement with a glamorous family condemned to destroy themselves through drink and wilfulness. Violence and jealousy drive the action. The ...”

“... penury with Trapnel is a tribute to his late friend’s remarkable effect on women; Maclaren-Ross may have lacked funds, but he was never short of adoring women. ‘People think because a novel’s invented, it isn’t true,’ Trapnel remarks at the beginning of a long monologue on the art of biography. Placed beside Paul Willetts’s oddly spiritless ...”