“... for a country undergoing political upheaval is a messy and dangerous business, and it is by no means guaranteed to succeed. We think of South Africa in the early 1990s as a heartening example. ‘A relatively conservative Afrikaner leader decided to negotiate before he had lost,’ the journalist Colin Eglin said, ‘and an imprisoned leader of a ...”

“... a Proust fanatic and a New Woman. At her funeral, Georgia O’Keeffe said: ‘Florine made no concessions of any kind to any person or situation.’ But she was also great fun. When she finished a painting, she gave it a tea party, inviting a (carefully curated) collection of guests.Writing about Stettheimer in 1980, Linda Nochlin called her a ...”

“... did not appear until 1837 and was quickly supplanted by two popularising and very popular works, John Forster’s The Life and Adventures of Oliver Goldsmith (1848) and Washington Irving’s Life of Oliver Goldsmith (1849). Forster and Irving built on Prior’s research to reinstate – affectionately, but still damagingly – the simple, unworldly ...”

“... perhaps the most like Grendel’s arm after Beowulf tears it off and hangs it up in Hrothgar’s hall: huge, a bit of a mess, and, in its vastness, terrifying to contemplate. The earliest discussions call this kind of verse ‘melic’ (the Greek melos means ‘song’), and roughly distinguish sung poems from epic and tragedy. Aristotle, who had a strong ...”

“... to possession of my fantasy library. Some of the books were hard going – I never got on with Hall Caine or Jeffery Farnol – but there was enough enjoyable reading there to keep me busy for quite a while. A couple of years later, a generous Welsh bibliophile my parents knew gave me the first forty volumes of the Edinburgh Review, along with Foxe’s ...”

“... Museum) and the National Gallery. Piero della Francesca was a figure of special interest for both John Charles Robinson, an agent for South Kensington as well as for private collectors, and Charles Eastlake, the first director of the National Gallery, because of the extreme rarity of his portable pictures. There was only one work by him in any public – or ...”

“... boom: now it is the epicentre of urban insecurity. The city is familiar with crisis, however, and no one could say it had surrendered to the new and old dangers it faces. Although disaster experts warn that a dirty bomb could result in the evacuation of millions of panicked residents and require the demolition of contaminated buildings and streets, the demand ...”

“... ideas while obscuring his overt possession of them. That he chooses to read a fiction in a lecture hall rather than a lecture enables him to pose the unspeakable instead of talking about the impossibility of speaking it. Last year he and I took part in a conference in Holland on the problem of evil. The participants fumbled around with the primary grotesquerie ...”

“... Life magazine from 1986 quotes someone from the AAA saying of this 287-mile stretch: ‘There are no points of interest. We don’t recommend it. We warn all motorists not to drive there unless they’re confident of their survival skills.’ It doesn’t seem to me all that lonely, least not these days, but it’s quiet enough. ‘I think I need to hold off ...”

“... to the defence of the threatened mainstream, which sounds a bit like a call to defend Elton John or MTV. Either Paterson’s mainstream poets were not as middle of the road as his name for them suggested, or the threat levels were being artificially hiked up. The Iraq invasion was taking place at the time and angry avant-gardists quickly drew the ...”

“... be altered to follow not what actually happened, but what ought to have done. Surely (in Ragtime) John Pierpont Morgan might have invited Henry Ford to lunch to talk about reincarnation; and why wouldn’t the anarchist Emma Goldman have given a full-body massage to the society divorcée Evelyn Nesbit (accompanied by a lecture on sexual politics)? These lines ...”

“... science and technology. In the United States, this commitment was interpreted as a green light for no-holds-barred military and industrial espionage. Cyber-warfare became one of the administration’s major themes. In October 2012, the secretary of defence, Leon Panetta, raised the stakes further by declaring that the outcome of a concerted attack on key US ...”

“... decrypts poured in from Bletchley, to be mulled over by a team including the legendary Admiral Hall, whose Room 40 in the Admiralty had laid the foundations of modern cryptography during World War One; Stewart Menzies, head of SIS (the model for James Bond’s M); Lieutenant-Colonel Kenneth Strong from Military Intelligence, who had, in 1940, warned the ...”

“... of the Interior, once told FDR. ‘Because I get too hard at times?’ Roosevelt asked. ‘No,’ Ickes replied, ‘because you won’t talk frankly, even with people who are loyal to you.’ Joseph Persico, whose admiration for FDR, like that of many Americans, is close to hero-worship, treats FDR’s endless deceptions and tricks with ...”

“... began, in March 2003, the 30-year-old Stewart sent his résumé in to the Foreign Office but got no reply; undaunted, he set off for Baghdad to ask for a job directly. He landed the position of deputy governor for the southern province of Maysan, on the Iran-Iraq border, where he would spend six months before shifting to the dangerous neighbouring province ...”