“... the Venona NKVD traffic don’t look so hot from the defence point of view. Devotees of the case may want to fault Tanenhaus for repeating what earlier witnesses told Allen Weinstein for his book, Perjury, and for taking the Hungarian papers at their face value, while excluding some second thoughts in both cases. There is no reason this argument should not ...”

“... popular culture and the media seems to wax ever greater even as American economic power wanes. It may not, in fact, matter very much who wins the next American Presidential election, or indeed the one after that. Maybe we should be thinking, not of 1988 or 1992, but of 1996. America has no real alternative to continuing imperial decline: the big questions are ...”

“... can be a third explanation. If the misrepresentation of Edward Atiyah ever ceases, the credit may be due to a number of Israeli scholars who have spent years in their country’s archives attempting to discover and present the truth. Among them are Yehoshua Porath, professor of Middle East History at the Hebrew University, and several younger historians ...”

“... length and breadth of the British feminist pedigree. British feminist effort between 1860 and 1914 may sometimes seem fragmented, she says, but in reality it concentrated fire from several directions on the same target – male exploitation of the female sex – and gained force from the many-sidedness of its approach. This aspect of Kent’s argument is less ...”

“... they could not survive in accommodation with other traditions. They must live apart. Living apart may have been acceptable as long as their hold on power was underpinned by successive British goverments: but that is no longer the case. The fundamental change that has taken place as a result of the Anglo-Irish Agreement is a change that is deeply and fully ...”

“... grimness of most of the story. For younger readers, formed in the Thatcherite world, the account may arouse the same incredulity, concerning a world they could barely imagine, as a visit to the dinosaurs at the Natural History Museum. But this passionless account comes at a price. The second telling aspect is Heath’s extraordinary lack of reflection about ...”

“... of modern times, assumed the Board chairmanship in 1996, he, too, cocked up in this direction. It may be that there’s something about running an opera house that goes to the head of almost everyone who comes in from outside and thinks they can do it – and in that sense Tooley’s insistence on theatre experience as a requisite in an opera house boss makes ...”

“... and routine rather than self-conscious. This does not preclude great accomplishment; in fact it may encourage it. Every day of the year, in every large English cathedral, choral evensong is sung. The core of what the choristers perform was written at a time when these craft traditions were matched by religious belief, by composers like Tallis, Purcell, Byrd ...”

“... in the crimes of the Queen just as people now believe/disbelieve in aliens. They think there may be something in it, though they know the stories don’t bear looking at too closely; anyway, believing in aliens is more fun than not, and at the root of the whole problem is a restless intimation that ‘they’ are keeping something from us, that in dark ...”

“... This period, which culminated in the ‘revolutionary game’ played out during the events of May 1968, began in earnest with the ‘scandale de Strasbourg’ in 1966, when students inspired by the Situationists took control of the students’ union. Their demands were simple: ‘abolish everything’ and ‘destroy the university’. On the orders of the ...”

“... book owes more to his admiration for the novels of Fenimore Cooper than to any field trips he may have taken into the French countryside. Sand knew the country at first hand, having spent a lot of her childhood and regular periods of her adult life in the quite grand house in Nohant that had been her grandmother’s. She admits in L’Histoire de ma vie ...”

“... That so little has been written on later 19th-century Manchester, despite Taylor’s invitation, may (for once) be blamed on Asa Briggs, whose excellent Victorian Cities (1963) threw historians off the scent by arguing that Manchester, the ‘shock city’ of the first half of the century, had, by 1877, ‘long outgrown the days when it could be described as ...”

“... take in these new opportunities to taste ‘the pleasures of the imagination’. Georgian England may now, in our culture’s memory, be associated with ‘order, stability and decorum’, but ‘contemporaries saw their culture as modern, not traditional, an indication that their society and way of life was changing. It was its dynamism, variety and ...”

“... identity and needs. At last we Scots have had an opportunity to redress our grievances. On 6 May 1999 we cast our votes for the first Scottish Parliament since the Union of 1707. And almost 42 per cent of the electorate stayed at home. It did rain, I suppose. Since the devolution referendum of 1997, media attention has largely focused on the threat posed ...”

“... at the unfairness of hard-currency shops which tantalisingly display what the native Russian may not buy. The sum total of Yevtushenko’s ‘criticism’, however, is that the Soviet Union hasn’t quite got its act together yet. As one approved character puts it: Why do we still have lines [queues]? Because we’re poor? Ludicrous ... No country is ...”