“... with a grudge, melting into the crowd. There have been plenty of incidents – George Wallace or Robert Kennedy – like that. Taiwan is in its way a highly politicised society, in which partisan passions run deeper than in older and more jaded democracies, and the immediate effect of the magical missile has been to polarise public opinion more than ever ...”

“... prime ministership and the Shia office of house speaker, down to the lowliest post in the civil service. Now, almost sixty years later, Salibi, the author of the standard history of Lebanon – A House of Many Mansions – was watching the Syrian army pack up and go home across the French-created border. There was no 21-gun salute. ‘If they had withdrawn ...”

“... a large Mongol population remained in Russia, intermarrying with the Slavs and entering into the service of the Russian state. Many common words in Russian are taken from the Tatar, ‘and there is also reason to suppose that the shamanistic cults of the Mongol tribes were incorporated into the Russian peasant faith.’ Figes goes so far as to suggest that ...”

“... as once, at least, the river has seen slaughter. It was in 1388 that Richard II’s favourite, Robert Vere, led his army floundering along this flooded valley, desperate to escape his baronial pursuers, who eventually caught up and cut most of them down a little upstream at Radcot Bridge.15 February. R. and I go down to Leicester Square at noon, the Tube ...”

“... capitalisation required. It was a serious thing, trying to be a writer. My ex-boyfriend, Robert, had just won a national book contest. When I first saw David, he was kneeling next to Robert’s chair, looking up at him. I thought he looked like a little bird waiting to be fed. But David noticed me in a different ...”

“... published in 2009 to mark the fortieth anniversary of Cottam power station in Nottinghamshire, Robert Davis quotes one of the employees: There was so much wastage during the CEGB days. It was like they had money to burn. The stores were always full and we had spares for everything. Bureaucracy was part of the problem. If you signed stuff out of the ...”

“... him the first issue of the Black Mountain Review and introduced him to the work of artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Motherwell, Cy Twombly and Ray Johnson.Opinion is divided about his appearance. ‘He thought of himself as ugly,’ a boyfriend from the early 1960s said. ‘But when you saw Andy naked, he looked ...”

“... become painful: ‘As for the New Testament, narrative power of the highest quality (in the service of the great message it conveys) is displayed time after time.’ Phelps’s studied blandness mostly muffles – here, suffocatingly – any grinding of axes. Nonetheless, a certain amount of parti is being pris. He admits in the Preface that many ...”

“... for which society cannot find a use. In 1829, an Oxford-trained barrister called Sir William Robert Grove found a new way of making electricity: he trickled oxygen and hydrogen gases over a pair of electrodes and produced three things. One was heat. The second was water. The third was electricity. There were no moving parts to the instrument, and no ...”

“... them there; the families’ ancestors; a barbecue; the holidaymakers’ children; mosquitoes; service-industry employees; the ibis; fruit trees; the daytime sky; night and stars. These are the mosquitoes, humming across four extremely long lines (the extended verse line echoes the oral tradition on which this ‘song cycle’ draws): they find the ...”

“... other but with all of it ultimately deadening. The story appeared in 1960 in Kenyon Review, where Robert Lowell would very likely have seen it, and where he would, I suspect, have found the penultimate line of his poem ‘The Flaw’, addressed to a woman lying beside him: ‘Dear Figure curving like a question mark’. Callisto’s girlfriend ‘lay like a ...”

“... peace’. When set beside ‘anti-courtly’ Spenserian verse, ‘To Penshurst’ and ‘To Sir Robert Wroth’ ‘give the sense of a nation which, whatever its faults, is essentially harmonious and well-ordered and reflects credit on its governors’. Even so, there are dangers in calling Jonson a ‘court poet’ and a ‘conservative’: more of them ...”

“... were used by the Government to counter the hold of English-speaking capitalism. The Civil Service was greatly expanded and its ethnic character radically altered. In a sense, the 1948 election was the workers’ revolution in South Africa. Yet because there was a common danger from the black proletariat and growing international pressure against the ...”

“... were the ‘reformadoes’, Parliamentary soldiers previously disbanded and now eager for fresh service. And not least there were the Presbyterian colonels and majors within the New Model itself who, once geographically separated from their colleagues in the high command, could be turned against them. In the spring of 1647 it was Presbyterian ...”

“... of the reactionary veteran and Freikorps man; doubly objectionable in one who had seen so little service. Kissinger’s fear of weakness and humiliation, and his pathetic adoration of the winning or the stronger side, has an interesting counterpart in much the same period. As he was working his way into Harvard, so we learn from Isaacson, in late-night ...”