“... by Stalin: he believed that an Italian revolution was not imminent and that to defeat Fascism broad alliances were needed with poor southern peasants and Catholics. All this was in clear opposition to the disastrous sectarianism of the class-against-class analysis. In prison, Gramsci fell out with a number of Communists (many of whom had returned to Italy ...”

“... of the absurd – swelled up and burst in the 1900s, and salaams have been performed in front of Richard Olney’s Simple French Food by some of the most precious amateurs in New York and London. (Oddly, when so many food books of little worth are published here – the unspeakable in pursuit of the edible – this frugally illustrated, decently produced ...”

“... is not beyond the reach of the educated outsider. The level of expertise required to grasp the broad implications of research is not the same as that required to advance that research. The real problems lie elsewhere. If a tolerable level of scientific understanding is not beyond the reach of the general public, who might be expected to provide it? Most of ...”

“... Thompson fills in this background to Lucan’s later life and its ultimate debacle with a clumsily broad brush. The milieu she describes of ‘Terry-Thomas dashers and Kay Kendall girls’ lacking in social ‘self-awareness’, for whom ‘the threat of levelling tendencies’ and ‘the encroachment of Lucky Jim Dixon’ had yet to loom, is as crude a ...”

“... the pedagogic process as commonly understood was most fantastically absent’. It gave them the broad freedom to wander about the streets, gardens, museums and inspiring curiosities of Paris, to shop for books and to ‘gape’ at café life (‘pedestrian gaping having been in childhood prevailingly my line . . . my sole and single form of ...”

“... to know why the inhabitants of a dying town could only discuss their problems in a cloud of smoke. Richard Klein, Professor of French at Cornell, could supply Mrs Willis with a number of answers, one of them being that, in wartime, smoking keeps up ‘courage and endurance in the face of intolerably stressful circumstances’, not only because of its ...”

“... Yohji Yamamoto manner. Krier by contrast wears a lot of linen, and he has the wire-frame glasses, broad-brimmed hats and neck stock associated with minor characters in Merchant Ivory adaptations. He keeps his hair in a bird’s nest and has a vaguely clerical air. But despite his mild appearance, Krier is an architect with a violent edge to his ...”

“... when others are trying to prevent them from realising them’. The pursuit of power was not, as Richard Evans seems to suggest in his introduction, a distinctive feature of 19th-century Europe. What changes over time is not the fact that people seek power, but the means by which they do it, as well as the nature of the contest with those who resist them. In ...”

“... then of the poets Langston Hughes and Sterling Brown, and next a line of novelists headed by Richard Wright, began the task of reclamation about two generations earlier than the Caribbean writers who identified – if one can nowadays put it that way – with Europe, specifically England. Their literary industry, centred largely in London, only really ...”

“... he piles up new information ‘like fresh coal beside clinkers’. The concentrated power, the broad erudition, the impeccable aim which characterise Grafton’s vignettes are enviable. Münster, Francis Bacon, Georgius Hornius, Isaac de la Peyrère are conjured up as if by the spells of an unusually effective Renaissance magus. As a survey of its ...”

“... the Cold War and, in a dig at Bush, for his ability to govern without partisan rancour. In 1985 Richard Reeves published The Reagan Detour, a book aimed at fellow Democrats who were disheartened by Reagan’s stunning victory in the 1984 election. He assured his readers that Reaganism would be short-lived: Americans still supported Social Security, they ...”

“... interruptions and insults, as well as open threats. Eleven days later, Matteotti was seized in broad daylight near his house in Rome and bundled into a car. The identity of the person who gave the orders, what those orders were and the involvement of Mussolini have been the subject of debate ever since. Matteotti was stabbed to death soon after his ...”

“... 1995, ‘about three times the number currently engaged in such work’, who would ‘reflect the broad mix of legal, investigative and administrative skills and experience needed’. It would have twelve commissioners, three of whom had to sign off on the decision to refer a case to the Court of Appeal. Among the first commissioners were David Jessel, who ...”

“... only part of a public interplay that developed between newspapers, memoirists like ex-CIA head Richard Helms, CIA staff like Kermit Roosevelt and Wilbur Eveland, and Congressional investigators. The more that came out about the CIA, the more appalled and nervous the British authorities became, and with good reason. What the CIA do is what MI6 do. And what ...”

“... States, which avoided the polarities of Right and Left. Instead, political parties evolved as broad non-ideological coalitions, with ‘wheeling and dealing, log-rolling and compromise’ the standard idiom of the nation’s ‘pragmatic, commonsense, split-the-difference’ politics. Unburdened by the intrusiveness and expense of big ...”