“... of the Southern Review: ‘PLEASE ADVISE BY WESTERN UNION IF MRS LOWELL KNOWS SHORTHAND.’ At home, she had to retype his poems every time he changed a word. During the war he was in prison for several months for his own bizarre form of conscientious objection, and he possibly broke her nose at least one more time in a fight. Their last summer ...”

“... is a man of some culture – he reads Dante and Shakespeare, thinks of Odysseus as he travels home – but the lineaments of his experiences may be typical of those ‘BOR’s’ who served in the colonies during the war. And his lack of liberal sympathy may have one merit: for it is perhaps a further refinement and extension of Imperialism to seek, in ...”

“... as protector. Britain had been approached a number of times, but the Empire had no vacancies. Lord John Russell defined his attitude to Mexico in what could serve as a permanent axiom of British diplomacy: ‘it would be ... unwise to provoke the ill feeling of North America unless some paramount object were in prospect, and tolerably easy of ...”

“... of witnesses and the rigging of a High Court jury, exposed the complete dependence of the Labour Home Secretary Merlyn Rees on the ‘advice’ of comical yet sinister reactionaries in the security underworld – forces that had demonstrated many times that they did not care about election results and did not care for election results that returned non-Tory ...”

“... just for us), and then by the way the literary journalism overreaches itself when it touches home base. It’s a pity that James, who can talk with such trenchancy and sense about everything from Mandelstam to Martin Amis, makes such a fool of himself (and of us) when he touches on the literature of his birthplace. His recent overview of Australian ...”

“... in a car who worked on the next farm and I was told quite severely that I would be given a lift home. I had to finish the ice cream in a rush. When I went out in the street and got into the unfamiliar car, the man said he’d seen Bella on the road and we’d stop and pick her up on the way back. He seemed very angry. And when we found Bella, who’d hardly ...”

“... he was swallowed by the whale, and other curious matters of science and antiquity. Their first home was a furnished bungalow on the outskirts of Croaking, quite convenient to James’s anodised-aluminium university and just downwind of a farting refinery belonging to the Department of Cleansing and Pollution, which is one agency of government whose right ...”

“... amount of money had been paid for his transfer from Philadelphia. If he tells me that story about Lord Booby and the Duke’s daughter once more, I thought, I shall scream like a mad vicar. Not really listening to him, I examined his body and clothing, seeking clues. He had an unusual face: some said he was an Albino Negro, but I thought him too pale for ...”

“... of these books combine to remind us of the role of economic development in our history, and force home the fact that there can be no true separation of economic history from other histories. The dates bounding the Checklands’ volume in the New History of Scotland might seem to be ones of political significance primarily, but 1832 and 1914 mark very nearly ...”

“... death, have seen my eldest daughter fading day by day, and to crown all have had my husband come home half-killed, to need constant tendance for six weeks, and during that time was myself suffering from a painful disease joined to the consciousness that I was ‘breaking down’. – I wrote my last monthly instalment for Cassell’s with vinegar to my head ...”

“... period of arduous military training; eventually he was sent to France as a signaller. His letters home convey military life experienced by ear – he heard the departure of a battalion to the Front as the end of the development section in the first movement of Beethoven’s Ninth. A later posting had a ‘Scarlatti, early Mozartish’ atmosphere. He ...”

“... black sweaters and tight jeans, watching the furious activity and dialogue, and then went home to read Being and Nothingness (or perhaps just its popularisation in Colin Wilson’s The Outsider). And maybe, later on, it was Marlowe and Spade who gave us the courage and foolheadedness to take to the streets. We were young and had energy to expend, so ...”

“... It was evident that she was embarrassed, and all the more so when I showed her ‘the little Lord Jesus’ that I had lifted off the arms of the Virgin Mary on a small musical box, presumably (in this atheist household) borrowed from nursery school. The police officers laid out what they had found: the official history of the Soviet Communist ...”

“... was prompted by local piety, for Brown was brought up and has his constituency in Smith’s home town of Kirkcaldy, but it was also a product of his distaste at the reductive reading of Smith by those on the right, and his need to find historical inspiration for a non-conservative, communitarian engagement with the inevitabilities of global ...”

“... to minister of state sooner rather than later. Mullin accepts again. He quits as chair of the Home Affairs Select Committee and joins what is baggily known as the Department of Environment, Transport and the Regions (DETR): in effect, the Ministry for John Prescott, whose amour-propre demands a duly sprawling apanage. Mullin goes to Fenwick’s at his ...”