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“... faces of my children staring out across the bay as if they might catch my eye, already whitened by sunlight and salt, between an acre of sea and an acre of sky. The answer –? The answer is –? The answer, I thought, is to slip this dead hand and swim for that stony spit and the serpentine rocks, where I fished myself out and stripped off laying my ...”

“... As someone once said, although we do not know exactly when, time is of the essence. It can be given or taken, saved or spent, borrowed or beaten, kept or killed. There are old timers and egg timers, time bombs and time tables, time signals and time machines. There is half time and full time, short time and over time, standard time and local time, the best of times and the worst of times ...”

“... starboard and her bow started to sink. As the stern rose in the water, four great propellers could be clearly discerned. Then she was gone. George Henderson was only six at the time. ‘I can still sit here now,’ he told a TV crew in 1994, ‘and see that great liner just sliding below the waves.’ The Lusitania, launched ...”

“... On 24 July, in a speech to the Rwandan parliament, David Cameron said that the old ideological divisions concerning aid and trade – aid is ‘wasteful’, trade is ‘unfair’ – needed to be abandoned in favour of a commitment to what works. He talked about the importance of transparency and accountability at both governmental and non-governmental levels to ensure that resources were used efficiently and money reached its targets ...”

“... volume, The Story of the Jews: Finding the Words, spent 473 pages on the 2500 years between 1000 BC and 1492 AD. The second, enigmatically entitled Belonging, requires 790 pages to cover the 400 years between 1492 and 1900, and two characters who presumably attracted Schama because they both preached a Jewish return to Zion. Chapter 1, ‘Could It ...”

“... of protracted and divisive confrontation. The initial phase of hostilities was largely driven by a scattering of younger scholars on the radical left, whose views on the shortcomings of the discipline were summed up in an influential article by Kurt Forster, entitled ‘Critical History of Art, or Transfiguration of ...”

“... this book makes us ask. When are we really in touch with it? How much of it is left for us to be in touch with? I felt in touch with it myself one afternoon, three miles from my home, when I started to climb a scaur of limestone that formed the jamb of a narrow cave. At my feet I noticed a kestrel, a young one, crouching motionless on the grass with wisps ...”

“... A contemporary explained: ‘In engraving and its operation the process of thought may be carried on with that of the work, and neither be retarded in its progress, by one who is master of his subject in either way. Hence the wild and fanciful theories that emanate from a well ...”

“... like this. Although known for his charm, wit and talent as mimic and raconteur, Jeremy Thorpe will be chiefly remembered as the deviser of much of the programme of modern British liberalism, and the architect of one of its great periods of electoral success. The grandson and son of undistinguished Conservative MPs, Thorpe was educated at Eton and Oxford, where ...”

“... In the case of the Liberals this merely confirmed Thatcher’s view that they were not to be taken seriously, particularly as the vote set the members at odds with the leadership of the Alliance and represented a direct rebuke of David Owen’s much more hawkish SDP. Labour was different. ‘The Labour Party will ...”

“... Democritus in his cell the window framing sea and sky, blue climbing on blue, a glaze shaken by the heat, as she drifted in and held heavy in the thickening air. It was this: a man writing, herself as witness, the swarm now stalled and gorged. When I die, bury me in honey. Fill an amphora three times my height, five times my bulk, then let me down into ...”

“... This​ is a dry and dutiful book which reads like a ghost story. The person being haunted is David Cameron. Theresa May grew up in a Cotswolds village called Church Enstone, where her father was vicar for much of the 1960s. The vicarage is within five miles of what became Cameron’s constituency home when he was MP for Witney and is roughly the same distance from what is now Soho Farmhouse, a members’ club, a little piece of the metropolis that is a haven for the Chipping Norton set ...”

“... Yaron of collaboration with Nazi leaders in 1944. As a member of the Central Jewish Council set up by the Nazis, Yaron had known that millions of Jews had already died in extermination camps. Nonetheless he agreed to assist Eichmann with his plan to destroy the Jews of Hungary. Is there anyone in Britain interested in the theatre, in civil liberties or in Jews ...”

“... Some of its contributors are Marxists, feminists and postmodern philosophers. Could anything be more at odds with the no-nonsense common sense of the ordinary man or woman? We have become so accustomed to this usage that it is something of a shock to be reminded by Sophia Rosenfeld ...”

“... but it is better looking and better known. One of the most striking views of the Golden Gate can be had from a small rocky island due east. But if you wanted to see it from there you had to be a prisoner or a guard on Alcatraz, an island named by the Spanish explorers for the pelicans ...”