“... certainly not Mandela – took any decision without consulting Sisulu first. When I reviewed Anthony Sampson’s biography of Mandela in the LRB,* I raised the problem of Mandela’s own probable SACP membership. This was strongly contested by Sampson, and the notion is upsetting to many of the great man’s admirers because it might mean he’d lied in ...”

“... Lincoln should be taken from them, since he was too merciful a man to punish the Southern slave-masters as they deserved. The nation was still almost as hot-blooded as old John Brown had been before the war, a cruel terrorist in the cause of liberty, declaring: ‘Without the shedding of blood there is no remission of sins.’ Such the wild sayings. Gore ...”

“... in Russian) which purported to confirm the genuineness of her Poussin. I inquired whether Anthony Blunt had been consulted and she was scornful. You would not, she explained, expect an Englishman like Blunt to agree with a Soviet specialist. Before I left the flat, I asked how it was that she knew of my interest in Dreyfus. ‘I too have my service de ...”

“... of “power” as we know it today.’ It had never occurred to me that the two philosophical masters, whom we were always told to revere as the founders of Western thought, had no idea of power in their heads. I rushed to the library to consult a Classical Greek dictionary. I could find tyranny, democracy, aristocracy, monarchy, city, army etc, but no ...”

“... a socialist or social-democratic direction. Thus in the question and answer session which followed Anthony Giddens’s first Reith Lecture, the left-wing Stuart Hall argued that globalisation came with a right-wing agenda tied to its tail, one which was destructive of social solidarities, while the right-wing John Redwood objected that it came veined with ...”

“... of the lip, ‘a happy, world-revering naturalism’. Artists of a naturalist dispensation are masters of Romantic empathy, ‘of projecting themselves into the things of the outer world, of enjoying themselves in them’, whereas ancient artists regarded that outer world as alien and confusing, a place one had quite enough of without having to also ...”

“... to six British soldiers: Nigel Coupe of the Duke of Lancaster’s Regiment, and Jake Hartley, Anthony Frampton, Christopher Kershaw, Daniel Wade and Daniel Wilford of the Yorkshire Regiment. All except Coupe, a sergeant and father of two children, were aged between 19 and 21. They died in Afghanistan in March 2012, out on patrol in Helmand province, when ...”

“... it stands, would you believe it, for flawed character. It is with some relief that one turns to Anthony Glees’s Secrets of the Service. Glees is a professional historian and rightly attempts to place British intelligence operations in the context of the twists and turns of British foreign policy. In so far as it is possible, Glees has been meticulous in ...”

“... airy and vulgar as gravure advertisements for kitchenware. It is worth emphasising how far Penn, Anthony Mann, Fuller, Nicholas Ray and Peckinpah have disproved those rosy, statuesque images. Could Ford match the harrowing historical perspective of Little Big Man, the moral ambiguity of The Far Country, the painful violence of Run of the Arrow, the passion ...”

“... The system of ‘apprenticeship’, which bound freed men and women to work for their masters for a further period, was abolished in 1838, when ‘full freedom’ was granted after further campaigns in both metropole and colony. But it wasn’t full freedom at all. In the following decades, the emancipated struggled to enjoy the rights that had ...”

“... range of tones tends traditionally to be limited to the twin languages of his fellows and of the masters, which are usually parodies of one another anyway. (Mr Waugh also has his own famous-son-of-a-famous-father position to protect.)Mr Ingrams’s review displays to advantage and to his obvious satisfaction that rather strong line which he and some of his ...”

“... Pasmore and John Piper, whose art he admires, although with qualifications, Fuller has interviewed Anthony Caro on his work for, and relationship with Henry Moore, although he believes that Caro has done great damage to British sculpture. In the fourth issue he prints Grey Gowrie’s appreciation of Francis Bacon, written for the catalogue of the exhibition of ...”

“... stream – seemed to rob its defenders of any capacity to resist. For a class used to being masters of their fate, the revolution was a lesson in human helplessness which left them immobilised for the rest of their lives. Count Bobrinskoy, a rich landowner’s son from the province of Kiev, wrote of history as a beast unchained: There is something ...”

“... a governmental near monopoly. Parliament now contained Radical members such as the former Chartist Anthony Mundella, who had a major hand in the 1870 Education Act, the 1871 Factories Act and a series of other progressive measures, culminating in the 1889 Act that gave the NSPCC the enforcement powers it still possesses; Conservative members like Russell ...”

“... hit on a ruse to dissuade asylum seekers from luxuriating in what ministers (echoing their tabloid masters) saw as the great hospitality and openness of Britain. Section 55 of the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act, passed that year, punished ‘late’ asylum seekers by denying them financial support while also ensuring that they would not be permitted ...”