“... tribes – the core of the Armed Forces – support him means that Abdullah may represent the best hope for internal stability, even if he is not an enthusiastic backer of some perceived ‘Western interests’, such as arms sales. Despite an intermittent speech impediment, Abdullah can express himself forcibly and he clearly intends to clean up Saudi ...”

“... time-bomb and funding was increased for Western radio broadcasts into Central Asia in the hope of exploiting Islam’s anti-Soviet potential. The notion of a looming Muslim revolt could not have been more wrong. When the Soviet Union started to wobble in 1989, the Central Asian republics were conspicuous by their quiescence. Unlike the Baltic states ...”

“... children who’ve lost their way’. I don’t like to leave without a modest offer of hope. ‘The RPF is advancing rapidly. Soon they’ll reach Butare, and it’ll all be over. Just hold out for a few more days!’ I stare into bitter smiles. ‘That’s no solution,’ someone says. ‘Why not?’ ‘Because they’ll kill us.’ ‘But why on ...”

“... usually say about life on earth: it certainly seems a bit short on the Pauline virtue of hope, say.Nancy Mitford remembered reproaching Waugh for behaving with quite unprompted unkindness to a young admirer at dinner: ‘You have no idea how much nastier I would be if I was not a Catholic,’ he replied. ‘Without supernatural aid I would hardly be ...”

“... than New York, numerically speaking. His list of a score or so in which ‘a worthwhile novel can hope for notice’ has changed slightly since 1978, but most surviving papers on the list have considered Other People in the first three weeks.Twenty-odd reviewing outlets, however, are as nothing to the number of new novels in English that get published in ...”

“... of a writer whose lifelong financial needs and intense desire for fame compelled him to hope for commercial, popular success, even as it simultaneously provoked in him a revulsion against the concessions to stylistic and formal conventions he would be required to make. Thus, in the opening sections of Pierre, as in the opening sections of ...”

“... figures deplorable, the relish with which they are pursued in the tabloid press chilling. I hope Mr Langham gets a short sentence and that he will not become the pariah the authorities would like, and that the BBC, not these days noted for its courage, will shortly re-employ him. 11 August. On Saturdays the Guardian is running a series on ...”

“... life as ‘Roberts’ before the trial began, but decided to put him on the stand in the hope that it would remain concealed from the jury.Nor do Taylor’s bigamy and perjury appear to have damaged him much in the eyes of his friends. A hundred years later, and one could easily imagine them leaving him alone in the library with a loaded revolver. As ...”

“... other things he mentions not feeling he belongs to ‘the English Literary Happy Family’, as I hope neither do I.21 March. Reading a book about William Morris and Kelmscott, I come across a reminiscence by Philip Webb, who remarked to W.R. Lethaby: ‘The best of those times was that there was no covetousness; all went into the common stock … and then we ...”

“... herself: ‘Ireland insists that Yeats be buried here.’ De Valera’s wire to her read: ‘We hope that his body will be laid to rest in his native soil.’ Yeats himself had written to Dorothy Wellesley five months before his death: ‘I write my poems for the Irish people, but I am damned if I will have them at my funeral. A Dublin funeral is something ...”

“... is there in me which attracts men to me, young and old? I am deeply grateful for the power, and hope I may use it for the good of those who succumb to it.’ A year after Millicent’s birth, Mabel was dealt another blow. David was offered a job teaching astronomy and directing the college observatory at Amherst College, his alma mater. (He had failed a ...”

“... so suave is the rendering of the lives of the three women described here, one is emboldened to hope that even the most obtuse reader might come away from All We Know, if not with some synoptic understanding of the lesbian ‘tribe’ (whatever that might be), then at least with an ability to spot members of that tribe when they are seated around the dinner ...”

“... his poetry is least negotiable in the hands of people who read it on the look-out for what they hope to find there. He knew himself to be a great poet, a man privileged to receive the awesome and often close to terrifying visitations of genius. It is about the gestations of that poetry that he most often writes, as if in wonderment at his own ...”

“... the Mail campaign that led to the introduction of Section 28. (Thatcher’s authorised biographer, Charles Moore, suggested that her motive was her hatred of local government education policies, as if a legislative exercise in queer-bashing, which blighted the lives of gay children for a generation, were somehow excusable as a means to a worthy end.) In this ...”

“... Who Killed Aleksander Pushkin? (Not, we learn, his duelling partner and brother-in-law, George-Charles D’Anthès, but a grassy-knoll-style hitman hiding in the bushes.) And when you finally get to Pushkin, you’re liable to be told that if you don’t speak Russian you can’t get to him anyway, because it’s not his prose that makes him great. His ...”