“... sordid’, he thinks: there is far too much ‘soft social engineering’ – by which he means healthy-eating propaganda, eco-spying, anti-bullying and so on – and nowhere near enough ‘intellectually oriented classical and theoretical knowledge’, by which he means ‘Greek philosophy, Renaissance poetry, the ...”

“... that they were far better as a live band than in anything captured on record. Yet they all do. David Fricke, in his notes accompanying Peel Slowly and See, the Polygram reissue of their four albums with out-takes, quotes Morrison, Reed and Tucker all complaining about the failure to capture their live work, and he alludes to unrecorded work like ‘Sweet ...”

“... alert to the influence of women in history, which I’ve always thought of as the subtext, by no means always sexual, of so much public action; appreciative of thaumata, marvels, wherever they might be found (parallels with the New World suggested themselves); and open-minded about religion. A curiosity about foreign beliefs and habits was combined with an ...”

“... work and so casts light on some dark places. Her study goes up only to 1934, but that means that it covers the whole of the formative period. It is to be hoped that she will one day complete her work with a further volume – a possibility, one gathers, once she is ready with ‘the detailed explanation of references’ without which ‘it is ...”

“... synonyms every week. It was with characteristic British reserve, though, that Lieutenant-Colonel David Morgan, Commandant of the 1st Battalion of the Seventh Duke of Edinburgh’s Own Gurkha Riders, set about straightening things out. The Gurkhas are the British soldiers whom, in an ugly slur, Garcia Marquez accused of committing almost unprintable ...”

“... billion and suffered $3.5 billion worth of physical damage at the hands of the Israeli army. This means, according to the UN Conference on Trade and Development, that the ‘occupied Palestinian territory has lost at least one fifth of its economic base over the last four years as a consequence of war and occupation.’ Yet the authors of the Plan are ...”

“... the reason for her inability to keep him. Edwards’s professional expertise in American history means that Dev’s Americanism is given a new prominence in this study – not only his rapport with Irish-America, but the influence of President Wilson on his policies and tactics. The belief that Dev’s responsibility for and role in the Civil War were minor ...”

“... the sanctity of private property. There is a neo-liberal solution: don’t intervene, even if it means refusing to fly the flag. There is a Peelite solution: do not blink at the inevitable, but call it the national interest. There are many reasons for Mrs Thatcher’s failure to embrace any one of these unambiguously, but one of them is the struggle between ...”

“... one person in a million will get it, and that the total population is one hundred million. This means that of the hundred or so people who will get the cancer, some 99 should be correctly identified as having the disease. But if the whole population takes the test, the number of people mistakenly identified as having the cancer will be much larger: around 1 ...”

“... Volokhonsky’s 1990 translation – the translation of the notes is by Edward Wasiolek. In David McDuff’s 1993 version we read: ‘The greater the stupidity, the greater the clarity. Stupidity is brief and guileless, while wit equivocates and hides. Wit is a scoundrel, while stupidity is honest and sincere.’ And again, in Constance Garnett’s much ...”

“... backlash among Tory backwoodsmen, for whom the Union – long championed by their leaders – means little, and to whom the Scots are ‘subsidy junkies’ living high on the hog at the expense of the English taxpayer. Once the Scots vote for independence, so the fantasy runs, a low-tax Tory England beckons. However, it is not only ignorant Little ...”

“... Daisy Hildyard, Colin Kidd, James Meek, Ferdinand Mount, Jan-Werner Müller, Jonathan Parry, David RuncimanNeal Ascherson‘On​ 17 June poor France fell. That day, as we trudged past Greenwich … a tug skipper yelled gaily across the water: “Now we know where we are! No more bloody allies!”’ The writer A.P. Herbert recorded that. And it was ...”

“... secession war in 1993 (another $600,000 was intercepted before he could pay it into his account). David Mirtskhulava, the former minister of energy, had a mild heart attack when he was charged with pocketing $6 million on its way to pay Georgia’s bill for electricity imports. Georgia is not a sprawling continent, but a poor, steep country about the same ...”

“... a place not altogether unlike the white-ruled South Africa evoked in the frank confessional of David Schalkwyk’s opening chapter. In the apartheid world, the young Schalkwyk ‘was defined legally, socially and … psychologically as a “master”’, even as the material realities of bondage were masked (and painfully complicated) by the emotional ...”

“... a man with wild red hair (looking like Léonide Massine in The Red Shoes) who brings Livesey and David Niven tea in the country house where some amateurs are rehearsing A Midsummer Night’s Dream. This house seems to be set on a series of steps which, though the film was shot in the studio, relates it to Hardwick Hall and also to the dream sequences that ...”