“... must be broad enough not to be easily bridged or quickly cut through, must be under the close fire of the defence, and near enough to be effectively watched by night. The near edge of the entanglement should be about 20 yards from the trench, and it should be at least 10 yards broad ... It may sometimes be useful to construct a second belt of wire ...”

“... global warming-related item on the news at least once a week. Today, for instance, there are two: close to home, a judge throwing out the government’s phoney ‘consultation’ process over nuclear power, and further away, at a conference in Washington, an ‘informal agreement’ marking a new commitment to ‘tackling climate change’ and resulting in a ...”

“... than her Life of Powell. Would the difference be due to her relationship with the subject, a close friend whom for many years she knew and admired – Christopher Sykes on Waugh is the nearest parallel? In such cases, affection can shape the compass of a biography, personal knowledge lighting up but also limiting what can be said. Perhaps there are ...”

“... after the annual church picnic had concluded with watermelons. Aunt Annie was cheerful but frank. ‘The man buried here,’ she would say, ‘was a cousin of ours, and he was so mean I don’t know how his family stood him. And this man here,’ she would continue, moving along a few steps, ‘was so good I don’t know how his family stood ...”

“... visceral and intimate; its endangerment was realised in the instantaneous transmission of a close-up pistol shot to the gut. It is a perfect piece of raw material for a film that relentlessly explores the human body, and assaults the body of the spectator. Stone’s aim is to make us not so much sec as feel the physical reality of Kennedy’s skull ...”

“... a year before quarrelling with Malachi over a phrase used just after the death? They have been in close contact for most of the time. And why does he not shave, when Malachi does? Malachi had coaxed him into giving up his Paris beard (Ellmann’s Joyce, p. 136), and this was to have been a gala day for Stephen, standing treat with his earnings. Kenner himself ...”

“... made deep incursions into the territory of English letters, pruning all rhetorical exuberance with frank impiety. He needed Joyce to be Irish; he needed a mentor to be remote from the centre and thus to be a writer who would, by necessity, break moulds; it could somehow justify Argentina and its terrible distance from where life or letters began. Flann ...”

“... with Freud’s Moses and Monotheism; with mid to late Derrida; with Barthes, the decoder of the close-up face in cinema and the figure in the still photograph. She shows us the swaying edifice of Weimar as it goes down, and the horrors that followed. On the face of it, Life? Or Theatre? is the story of a young woman who was meant to kill herself and fought ...”

“... ever done on an 18th-century artist. It has been furnished with gorgeous reproductions, along with close-ups that illuminate Gillray’s care for visual detail and his uninhibited verbal wit. This account removes once and for all the question of why Gillray should have poured his enormous talent into a ‘minor art’. Henry Fielding’s Shamela – just a ...”

“... up – biographers pick and choose which to believe, and hope for the best. Her handwriting was close to illegible, so quotations from Mansfield’s letters and diaries tend to be all over the place too. The title of Claire Harman’s biography, All Sorts of Lives, points to the volatility of her subject and the difficulty of her task. But at least some ...”

“... leader to complain about the ‘strange dishes’ which weren’t ‘up to English standards’. Frank Forsdick and his men asked for ‘a bit of old English roast beef or a plate of fish and chips’ and beer instead of wine. It didn’t require the commercial vapidities of the Greenwich Dome – a Festival of Britain manqué – to reveal that such ...”

“... the summer of 1762 he found himself caught in the cross-currents of politics. William Burke, his close friend and possibly a distant relative, was busy canvassing merchant interests in an attempt to whip up opposition to the peace treaty about to be signed with France and Spain. Edmund joined in, declaring that the treaty was ‘the most shameful that ever ...”

“... terrorism, North Korea and Iraq. This is a wide-ranging work, in other words, and it repays close study, even by readers who will not find its perspective altogether congenial or convincing. It was America’s reckless foreign policy after 11 September, Mann explains, that compelled him to descend from his ivory tower. ‘For the sake of the ...”

“... of young Jews for whom identification with an explicitly illiberal, openly racist state, led by a close ally of Donald Trump, is impossible to stomach. As Peter Beinart wrote in 2010, the Jewish establishment asked American Jews to ‘check their liberalism at Zionism’s door’, only to find that ‘many young Jews had checked their Zionism instead.’The ...”

“... the WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, were to blame for the severity of the pandemic. ‘We must be frank about one of the primary reasons this outbreak spun out of control,’ Azar said.There was a failure by this organisation to obtain the information that the world needed, and that failure cost many lives … In an apparent attempt to conceal this ...”