“... Scottish king on what became English soil’. Feudal dynasties such as the Bruces and the Balliols held estates on both sides of the porous border. In the late 11th century, the Normans appropriated Hadrian’s Wall as a convenient borderline, turning Roman forts into Norman castles at Carlisle and Newcastle. Although by 1230 the eastern border had been pushed ...”

“... such as Donoso might be said to meet is Santiago’s National Stadium. Nearly 20,000 people were held there in the eight weeks after the coup; 41 of them were killed. It is one of the locations most strongly associated with the events of 1973. But in The Twilight Zone it’s something else as well: the site of some of the happiest moments of the narrator’s ...”

“... Alliance, when it was subsequently faced with ostensibly less intractable difficulties. Now that David Owen’s ‘continuing SDP’ has gone out of business, some gullible newspapers have written as though the party that was launched nine years ago had sunk with all hands aboard. In fact, of course, constitutionally and numerically, the real continuing SDP ...”

“... know this is a big movie, no skimpy, fake-ass wannabe shit.’ Lee’s idea of a big movie is David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia or Bridge over the River Kwai. He is also a great admirer of Oliver Stone’s JFK. Later we get a better look at Shorty and Malcolm in their immaculate zoot-suits, long coats, baggy pants tight at the ankles, broad-brimmed hats ...”

“... rather like reports from less-than-overwhelmed referees. Asa Briggs is dismissed in a few lines; David Landes is damned with the faint praise of ‘considerable literary skills and a certain old-fashioned rhetoric’; and Lord Dacre is rapped on the knuckles for failing to write a big book on the Enlightenment. Such comments are more revealing of their ...”

“... aside from the anachronistic nature of such terms, it is difficult to see how the diverse views held on diverse topics by such men could be so neatly summarised. As it happens, all five were proud to call themselves Whigs: but on topics political, theological and liturgical their differences defy simple classification. Spadafora’s book is both scholarly ...”

“... and other sources. The book focuses on the three sets of bilateral negotiations that Israel held between 1949 and 1952 with Syria, Jordan and Egypt respectively. The title of the book, like the poem by Robert Frost which inspired it, is rather ambiguous, perhaps deliberately so. Rabinovich declines to identify those who decided not to take the road ...”

“... signs in English were to be allowed. In recent years the percentage of Francophones in Québec has held firm and even crept up a bit, to 83 per cent. But this stabilisation is not the result of the mass conversion of Anglo or allophones to French. The weakness in Laurin’s theory is that non-Francophones are free to move on to another province, or perhaps to ...”

“... the wooden pallets – when we notice that the lorries behind us are idling. One wagon has been held up because of a query over waybills. The rest of us cannot move on until it has caught up. A straggling truck could be prey to pirate runabouts. There is nothing to do except inhale the smell of rotting fruit. Technicals sweep past us to interdict traffic ...”

“... mistakes. Which is how I came to spend a rather chilly day on a hill north of Sarajevo watching David, with one hand tied behind his back, tackling Goliath. Having learnt that they cannot rely on the UN to save them, the Bosnian Army were answering back, attacking an advanced Serbian position on the ridge of a hill. They were using an old Russian 70 mm ...”

“... of them became Anglican, but this seems an exaggeration. And some, while remaining in the Society, held aristocratic values and pursued an aristocratic life-style. At any rate that is the impression one gets from dipping into the Journal (1835-44) of Barclay Fox, which reveals exactly the kind of self-confident, debonair, but caring personality that ...”

“... of them. His idea of participation was to appear, but to appear detached. The formula caught and held a whole imitative school of lycanthropic scribblers, who could mock and jeer at the antics of the period without being so square as to be left out of the party altogether. The summit of this style – its glass of fashion and its mould of form – was ...”

“... my heart.’ Often, however, her formality couldn’t be improved upon – for example, to David Garnett: ‘I was grateful to you for your letter after Valentine’s death, for you were the sole person who said that for pain and loneliness there is no cure.’ It enabled her to deal with publishers, and, most difficult of all, to give away money ...”

“... in which Uriah Heep – ‘looking flabby and lead-coloured in the moonlight’ – explains to David Copperfield the experiences that showed him the value of being ’umble. ‘Dickens was a great connoisseur of hypocrisy,’ she writes, ‘yet he was not obsessive about it ... Why has his sense of humanity been so rare? Why are people so overwhelmed by ...”

“... the miscarriage of justice inflicted by the British legal system on the Birmingham Six. Lord Lane held in their 1988 appeal that ‘the longer this hearing has gone on, the more convinced this court has become that the verdict was correct.’ The US Court of Appeals seems to have accepted the prosecution case wholesale, convinced itself a priori of the ...”