“... in it and sent it east, in the hope of helping Russia by taking Constantinople and opening up the Black Sea. In the weeks after Brooke’s death landings were finally made on the Gallipoli peninsula and many of his battalion were gunned down by Turks positioned on the high ground; 11 of its 15 officers were lost by the end of June.Brooke was buried a few ...”

“... Robin got a gun for Belli and they went to track the injured leopard with Belli’s dog, an old black labrador, and a team of beaters. Belli found it in the forest, resting against a boulder, and hit it with another shot. It found the strength to flee, got as far as a stretch of open ground bounded by the rim of a thousand-foot precipice, and sat down ...”

“... on purpose to trap Heinz, Paula by accident. When Erich bangs up Paula, Paula’s dad beats her black and blue. Once they are married, Erich will also beat her black and blue. Erich’s only interest in life apart from his moped is beer. The dismal confinement of these rural destinies is understood as economic, but for ...”

“... sightseers awaiting the arrival of the more spectacularly sick. As I was borne in on a stretcher, black-shawled ladies gazed down at me, raised their eyes to heaven, and crossed themselves; I was obviously a goner. In more sophisticated medical surroundings I would, of course, have been in no danger at all, as all that had happened was that a duodenal ulcer ...”

“... read. Smile brightly. Bluff like a politician in a glass booth being manipulated by semaphoring black-suited attendants with clipboards. So? ‘All for the best in the best of all possible Londons,’ says the mayor, says the minister, says Joanna Lumley. ‘All for the best,’ say the entitled, the connected, the stakeholders, the investors and the ...”

“... of the New Left in the region, subsidising Jamaica under its social democratic prime minister Michael Manley, and Nicaragua after the Sandinista revolution in 1979. But by 1983 oil prices had collapsed and Venezuela’s two-party system had begun its long unravelling.Chávez, then, is best understood as an heir to the ideals of the NIEO, and its quixotic ...”

“... helping to keep white liberal panellists occupied and furrowed until the ferocious later phase of Black Power made them all squirm.) Kazin had been unable to attend the symposium itself but, never one to miss a party, popped into the reception being thrown by Commentary’s editor-in-chief Norman Podhoretz and his wife, the writer and editor Midge Decter, one ...”

“... nightmare, 20 more crates filled with letters. Selekt’s crates are yellow and stamped with the black hunting horn logo of Deutsche Post, the former German state mail monopoly that, like its Dutch counterpart, was privatised long ago. For years the two have been locked in a struggle for business on the streets of the Netherlands, part of a fratricidal ...”

“... now ambulance men ban kiss of life’; ‘Policeman flees Aids victim.’ In the early days, Michael Adler of Middlesex Hospital remembered, it was very difficult to get them hospitalised, it was very difficult to get patients treated as normal human beings. People were frightened, they thought it was contagious, the patients had to be put in side ...”

“... It’s tit in some way, it’s an infantile comfort. It’s an infantile comfort that is also a black pit.In its time, the book has had its admirers – my battered 1970s paperback carries endorsements from Richard Hughes, Naomi Mitchison and C.S. Lewis, and Auden was an early fan. (Auden was a patron saint of lost causes. He was also the only major writer ...”

“... and Calvin’s Institutes and, though he was apparently free of Calvinist guilt, his moods of black depression may have owed something to that unforgiving literature. He was a rebellious boy, given to impish pranks and easily bored – both lifelong traits. After devising ways to hide drawing pins in the chairs of unsuspecting friends, and walking out of ...”

“... charges, most of which were later thrown out of court. Justifying these arrests, the mayor, Michael Bloomberg, said: ‘Some people think that we shouldn’t allow people to express themselves. That’s exactly what the terrorists did, if you think about it, on 9/11. Now this is not the same kind of terrorism, but there’s no question that these ...”

“... that it succeeded at Lenin’s expense, a triumphant negation of Lenin’s success. Back in 1984, Michael Scammell wrote a fine warts-and-all biography of Solzhenitsyn which was forced to end on a note of uncertainty. Had Solzhenitsyn blown his great international success of the 1970s by retreating into angry exile in Vermont to write a multi-volume epic of ...”

“... in contemporary art may be best explained as a sort of collective intoxication, fuelled by black-tie auctions, the art fair in Basel, the Venice Biennale, and all the associated social events and flattering mirrors. But there is, in addition, strong institutional endorsement from the museums that hope to receive, or at least to borrow, some of this art ...”

“... these descriptors, but I’m not sure that the ‘slime’ scrubs off so easily.Balmoral is a black hole in the debate over land reform in Scotland. Conversations and policy positions are bent around it. Getting too close to the problem is seen to jeopardise proposals that command widespread support, such as public interest tests for large land ...”