“... was a small provincial capital: by the mid-1880s, a decade after Unification, its population had risen to more than 1.3 million and it was the focus of a newly powerful state. The way of life to which Fontane’s generation had become accustomed was disappearing, and the future was auspicious but uncertain. Fontane was always ambivalent about Berlin. He ...”

“... of the subject there, and to have scripted the contributions assigned to the Ettrick Shepherd, James Hogg. One scholar has asserted that the imaginary Hogg was an improvement on the real one, but the contributions do not bear this out. What did ‘James Hogg’ think of the ‘proceedings of these two Irish ...”

“... per story); over the whole of his writing career, roughly a twenty-year period, this number had risen to 160. In a comparable twenty-year period Hemingway wrote his ‘first forty-nine stories’, as Scribners described them when they were collected in a book in 1938. The genesis of The Great Gatsby, the work Fitzgerald hoped would bring him literary ...”

“... instincts of their own. By 1945 the number of large country houses in National Trust ownership had risen to 17, and a concerted defence was under way. Dornford Yates’s characters may have given up in disgust, but Victoria Sackville-West had dug in her heels and was busy re-establishing an ancestral home and garden at Sissinghurst. Sackville-West was a moving ...”

“... James Angleton​ , chief of counterintelligence at the CIA for twenty years, was not the ideal spy. The ideal spy is a mouse-coloured blur in the crowd, someone like George Smiley, described by his wife as ‘breathtakingly ordinary’. There was nothing ordinary about Angleton. Once experienced, his history, his appearance, his manner, and his stubborn refusal to be clear were all indelible ...”

“... Murmuring assent, I cast about for ways of developing this elegant theme, but the Minister had risen to speak, so I trailed off into silence and, with a polite smile at Seth, I retreated to my thoughts.I felt sure that I had made Vikram Seth appear by thinking about him. Michael Holme, the narrator of An Equal Music, makes the love of his life appear by ...”

“... a healthy reaction against overseas domination of our ideas. Nothing of native origin has so far risen to take its place. In passing, one may note the somewhat ironical fact that, while the entry on the Jindy-worobak movement itself is both full and accurate, the same cannot be said of that part of the long article on the aborigines which deals with the ...”

“... and medicine murders in grisly detail but paid more attention to what it considered, like King James I, to be the real threat of witchcraft. Another anthropologist, Isak Niehaus, has since published a superb account of witch-hunts in the area, while taking a more sceptical view of witchcraft. Now Colin Murray, an anthropologist, and Peter Sanders, a ...”

“... and the grammar delivered by Kerry, reported on 9 September that the absence of the signature of James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, from the Kerry document was a significant detail. Clapper evidently had refused to sign off because the data had been cherry-picked (as Colin Powell’s had been for his UN presentation in February ...”

“... preferring the ‘somewhat prolix’ monologues of these magnificent figures, who had risen from comparatively humble backgrounds, and fought in the most far-flung corners of the empire, to the literary quotations of the mullahs. Their relationships with politicians allowed them to observe how consistently the removal of a grand vizier led to ...”

“... includes thirteen features and more than thirty shorts.) Keaton had been on the stage longest, risen the highest, fallen the furthest, and, thanks to the medium of film which preserved his artistry, left the most indelible legacy. ‘He was,’ Orson Welles said, ‘as we’re now beginning to realise, the greatest of all the clowns in the history of the ...”

“... in more ways than in any previous era in modern history’. Held & Co agree that the costs have risen, but in a fascinating chapter called ‘The Expanding Reach of Organised Violence’ show that they have not risen everywhere to the point where war has become unthinkable. For states on the periphery of the rich ...”

“... among a field of crosses receding without end to the horizon, forms the book’s dust-jacket.) The risen soldiers see how little their sacrifice has mattered to the living, who are, of course, terrified by the spectral army and mend their ways. The dead return to their graves; but the dreamer goes completely mad, accuses the sun of allowing the carnage to take ...”

“... called the front downstairs room of our terraced house the parlour, but former neighbours who had risen to semi-detached affluence on new estates preferred to say lounge.) Your usage is thus in part receptive, in part elective. You may – as Ben Jonson put it a long time ago – ‘boldly nominate a spade a spade’: but given the appropriate social claims ...”

“... to Timothy – ‘Preach the Word.’ We have a message of redeeming grace through a crucified and risen Lord. This message is designed to go right to the heart of man and there meet his deep spiritual need. Nowhere are we commissioned to reform the externals. We are not told to wage war against bootleggers, liquor ...”