“... of naval intelligence, Lieutenant Commander Fleming undertook a secret mission to Washington in May 1941. He was ‘whisked off to a room in the new annexe of the embassy, locked in with a pen and paper and the necessities of life’, a colleague recalled, and there he wrote, ‘under armed guard around the clock, a document of some seventy pages covering ...”

“... convenor told me that Greta had personally invited the bin workers to march with her, which may be true, though I don’t think it matters if it isn’t. Militant GMB workers on a youth climate march; youth climate marchers with the Glasgow bin workers. That is something in itself.So what’s it like in there, the drum-bearer asked me when we reached ...”

“... it, a girl in a dirndl beckoning seductively. ‘Good morning, Sales Ledger, this is Martine, how may I help you?’ I have been put through.Phone-hold music is a late, trivial but characteristic effect of the technical revolution which over the past century has transformed the way we encounter music. Until the development of the radio and the ...”

“... difference; but it didn’t happen. Older voters tended to be the most staunchly Unionist: time may not be on the Union’s side. As yet, despite the Westminster party leaders’ widely publicised referendum ‘vow’, it’s not clear what will emerge. We may get a flavour of devo-max, the option Daveheart was determined ...”

“... is that Tunisia has reverted to the kind of dictatorship overturned in 2011. But whatever else he may be, Saied is a product of the revolutionary decade, a period that was unambiguously more positive in Tunisia than in any other Arab state. How could that decade have led to this?Tunisia​ followed the familiar post-independence path from anti-colonialism ...”

“... self-absorbed character in the book but also the hardest on herself. As far as literature goes she may have joyfully let her analytical skills go after her last exam, but she has her own shrewd sense of things, and of the change that attended the end of her formal education. ‘Dissent and scepticism had been easy while they were held tight inside its frame ...”

“... making the poem. You certainly couldn’t get further from the sentiment of Yeats – ‘A line may take us hours maybe;/Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought,/Our stitching and unstitching has been naught’ – or Hardy’s remark that he wouldn’t think of taking a poem through more than four drafts for fear it might lose its freshness: early ...”

“... Party scored only 20.5 per cent – a defeat of historic proportions. The European elections on 26 May delivered an even more crushing blow, as the SPD collapsed to only 15.8 per cent. In current polls the party is trailing in fourth place with barely more than 10 per cent of the popular vote. Twenty years ago, in their last decisive electoral victory, they ...”

“... the batrachoidal Farage likewise. ‘So where’s your sense of humour? It’s only a joke.’7 May. On the TV news footage of Stuart Hall arriving for the first day of his trial at Preston Crown Court; he is seemingly handcuffed with his hands held in front of him, but thus shackled has to negotiate the quite steep steps from the police van. At 84, he ...”

“... of this kind is the other reason it was a big mistake to think the South was Fascist. It may have been a one-party state, but the Democrats were not a one-state party. Southern Democrats didn’t have a single leader; theirs, as Katznelson says, was a ‘chaotic and anarchic’ organisation, riddled with local variations. More important, it was an ...”

“... last point was. In the absence of ground troops, or even the threat of ground troops, an enemy may move freely among civilians and do its worst. That is more or less what happened. The KLA, where they mattered at all, were powerless to tie down the Serbian security forces and distract them from atrocity, as a proper infiltration of Nato ground troops might ...”

“... Two days after May Day, the festival of labour, a story appeared on the front page of the Financial Times under the typically downbeat headline: ‘Work permit shake-up targets skill gap.’ It told of the Government’s introduction of a permit system which would allow rapid entry into the UK for foreign professionals and highly skilled technicians – doctors, nurses, software engineers, information technologists and others ...”

“... and insight, of any political sense and of either a romantic or realist ideology. Muybridge may not have been a completely dedicated imaginative artist, but he wasn’t just a technical inventor aiming simply to conquer movement with the camera. Solnit points to a conscious poetry in his different sorts of picture. He was never merely the detached ...”

“... egotism, envy, rancour, meddling, mediocrity and bad writing – imperfect heroism indeed. This may seem horribly unfair. It did to Todd when other people’s accounts of Wollstonecraft’s life were at issue. Taken by themselves, out of emotional and especially epistolary context (for it is the letters more than anything else that do her in), the events of ...”

“... down, and accordingly tend to be received as magisterial masterpieces, although their conclusions may be utterly different from one another. The question is never laid to rest. The hunt goes on for the smoking gun, the killer fact (these often deployed metaphors being the worst possible in the circumstances). Margot Asquith kept a diary for 47 years, off and ...”