“... by Muhammad Dahlan, whom many Palestinians suspected – rightly – was being groomed as the ‘strong man’ who would eventually assume the presidency and restore Fatah to power. The ultimate aim was to build a Fatah militia around Dahlan that could confront Hamas militarily – and win. American officials hoped in the meantime to place Fatah in a ...”

“... rebel. The split in the Labour Party over Europe was to be decisive. It led to the resignation of Roy Jenkins as Deputy Leader and to the breakdown of the old, controlling alliance on the centre-right of the party. The SDP, when it emerged ten years later, was the lineal descendant of the Labour rebellion. But dissent in the Conservative Party presented no ...”

“... but might have been disconcerted by such friends as Paul Johnson, who believes he would now be a strong Thatcherite, John Wain, who invokes Orwell as an opponent of Arthur Scargill, or in America Norman Podhoretz, who feels sure he would be taking his stand with the ‘neo-conservatives against the Left’. The New York Tribune, Rodden notes, went further ...”

“... and once in a delicate line-drawing of the 1950s, by Robert Rhodes James. But all this time, as Roy Foster’s book makes plain, another Lord Randolph has lain concealed by the conventions of portraiture. Winston, to whom his father was a divinity but also a stranger, wanted to prove that Lord Randolph possessed all the attributes of the ideal ...”

“... almost instantaneously, at any moment of the day or night, from one currency into another. ‘Strong’ currencies are strengthened and ‘weak’ currencies weakened: governments which try to stem these self-reinforcing tides are overwhelmed. The net effect, Michael Stewart suggests, is that the whole system is biased towards deflation. The national ...”

“... strange, unexamined reminders of an earlier, more solemn Kingsley Amis: ‘His hands looked strong and deft, like a precision mechanic’s. But his face held the attention. With its clear blue eyes, thin upper lip above delicate teeth, and generally flattish planes, it was both grim and gay, seeming to hold both these qualities at once when in repose ...”

“... the Count. Her routine has been put out, her expectations seriously disturbed. Imagine yourself on Roy Plomley’s desert island – at what times will you listen to your chosen discs? Will Mozart’s clarinet make you feel nice and sad in the morning, or frightfully gloomy at sunset? Will some old hit or jazz record bring back the days of your youth, or ...”

“... and France, highly centralised countries, feared a monolithic Community; Germany and Italy, with strong regional traditions, saw it as a congeries like themselves. The Benelux countries, some cynics added, looked on it in mainly mercantile terms. The Americans, meanwhile, seemed to believe that Europeans were enacting a slow provincial production of scenes ...”

“... extension of a spacious, cultured and pleasurable existence. Military history is a subject with a strong traditional core. The narration of battles, campaigns and wars goes back to Classical times and it is only a short step from Thucydides to Liddell Hart or G.M. Trevelyan. Howard, who wrote the first history in English of the Franco-Prussian War of ...”

“... The Lake Counties, first published in 1902, or the more recent The Lake District (1970) by Roy Millward and Adrian Robinson, a book that is perfect of its kind. But what I am asking for is a sense of first-hand experience, which is desirable especially when the subject is our experience as physical beings contriving to live in a physical ...”

“... it. He did not even receive the nomination of his own constituency party where the hard Left is strong, and he is regularly lambasted in London Labour Briefing for ‘using the anti-Labour capitalist media to damage the Left and reject socialist policies’, and for being ‘British capitalism’s main ally in the Labour Party today’ and part of an ...”

“... of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, producing such towering figures as Labrousse, Duby and Le Roy Ladurie. Ancient history has been carried along in the nouvelle vague of Medieval history – not surprisingly, as Momigliano recognised in 1961, given the seminal influence of Fustel de Coulanges, who admitted no such periodisation in French ...”

“... to demonstrate its social, political and religious orthodoxy. Both Harris and Dowbiggin thus make strong cases for recognising the central role which social factors play in theory construction and theory choice in the history of psychiatry. The pressures for a social analysis (or an ‘external account’) of the theories and practices of psychiatry are ...”

“... large-scale biography of Yeats, died in 1983, and after some vicissitudes the task devolved on Roy Foster, the professor of Irish history at Oxford. He has had access to Lyons’s notes and transcripts, invaluable to a successor confronted, as he says, with ‘a vast and unfamiliar subject’. Vast it remains, but the unfamiliarity has clearly ...”

“... out of water, an oddball. All four of these books tend to the latter sort. Adewale Maja-Pearce has strong grounds for taking this line: he is an English-born novelist, the son of a Nigerian father and a Scottish mother. In How many miles to Babylon? he tells us that he came home from his London school complaining that the other children called him a wog: his ...”