“... Russia and the West, he sent troops to help the Ukrainian government expel the Bolsheviks. In May 1920, Polish soldiers rode triumphantly into Kyiv. As Zimmerman says, his critics at home cautioned that the Kyiv campaign ‘constituted reckless overreach’, and later that month the Soviet Union struck back.The Polish-Soviet war of 1920 was short and ...”

“... the implications of nuclear warfare. It is only among the non-nuclear minor powers that war may appeal as a rational way of obtaining one’s ends. On the other hand, his prose style is dialectical and reflects the clash of thesis and antithesis in human affairs: as with Oakeshott’s writings, the meaning is not always on the surface. Few in his field ...”

“... as a writer and as a musician’ and his influence on her was of a deep and ambivalent kind that may have been partly responsible for difficulties in her subsequent relations with men. Sidonie, too, was revered and loved by Melanie, who in turn was doted on by the family in general, though she believed herself to have been an unplanned child. Her eldest ...”

“... kind of household as you, but something happened that turned everything upside down for us.’ ‘May I ask what happened?’ She didn’t answer immediately and seemed to hesitate. I was about to tell her that she need not reply when she said: ‘My father was a pious Jew. He wore a beard, earlocks and a long gabardine like all the others. He was a Talmud ...”

“... have been her own true nature while she was alive. She did not need to be trapped in mass.’ It may be that Winterson sees herself in converse terms, as energy without mass. Any possible historical Mrs Winterson is washed away by the opposing tides of rejection and appropriation, the speaking against her and the speaking for her. Yet there is also a fear ...”

“... and see not what Latin America is but what they would like Latin America to be so that they may satisfy their personal visions.’ He makes it clear that in writing the novel he felt ‘free to change, deform and invent situations, using the historical background only as a point of departure to create what essentially would be a fiction, that is, a ...”

“... the ambitious and brutal founder of the unified Qin state in 221 BCE. At a party conference in May 1958, Mao urged the emulation of an emperor who had advocated eliminating anyone who used history to criticise the present. When Marshal Lin Biao noted that Qin Shi Huang had burned books and buried scholars, Mao replied: ‘What was Qin Shi Huang? He only ...”

“... gazing entranced at some household object, or perhaps reading a letter with a half-smile; there may have been a curtain, suggestive of veiled meaning; there would have been an enigma. We concentrated on it at the expense of the enigma moving among us, smiling with gallant determination.And then the queen passed close to me and I stared at her. I am ashamed ...”

“... a difficult one. The war hadn’t been going well since the landings in the Pas de Calais in May 1946 were thrown back with terrible losses – a failure that had much to do with the amount of treasure and materiel that had been diverted to Britain’s nuclear weapons programme. The Americans remained preoccupied in the Pacific, still wary of the ...”

“... The response to ‘A Matter of Light’, as the draft was called, was not encouraging. ‘I may be totally wrong,’ Williams’s agent, Marie Rodell, wrote, ‘but I don’t see this as a novel with high potential sale. Its technique of almost unrelieved narrative is out of fashion, and its theme to the average reader could well be ...”

“... too late. She landed upside down in front of an excited crowd of twenty thousand’ – not, we may assume, looking quite unruffled. West, who wrote a lot of the script for Every Day’s a Holiday and took credit for all of it, bowed in the end to the censors, as a result of which the film was not funny and it flopped. Clothes, for those who could afford to ...”

“... quite an about-turn. Could you really exhibit something like this? Your nickname used to be ‘the May priest’, you know. After Gwangju, your art was so engagé, almost as though you were atoning for surviving the May massacres. You seemed so serious, so ascetic … all very romantic, I have to admit. In​ 1980 hundreds ...”

“... excreta, how odd that of all the available metaphors, Boris should have chosen to describe Theresa May’s efforts to improve her EU deal as ‘like polishing a turd’. Of course Powell wasn’t the first politician to draw people’s attention to the strangeness of the immigrants pouring into their cities. The locus classicus here remains chapter two of Mein ...”

“... harmless. One was the rise and fall of Anglo-American literature. I use the term, in what may be too subjective a sense, to span the period from the birth of Whitman to the death of T.S. Eliot. It could be said that before Whitman, no American poet of real gifts wrote American literature; and after Eliot, none wrote anything else. Between these two ...”

“... me in when he got in first, even taking my hand before shepherding us both past the box-office; he may even have paid.The film had already started, Errol Flynn flirting with Flora Robson as Queen Elizabeth while the usherette showed us down the aisle and before we had even sat down the man was pinching me and remarking on my nice chubby legs. This seemed ...”