“... new historians, among them Segev and Naomi Shepherd, the Zionist project is part of the saga of white settlement, as in North America and Rhodesia. The settlers declared independence only when they no longer required the Mother Country’s soldiers to subdue the natives. Presenting Israelis as colonisers, rather than as enemies of imperialism, was once the ...”

“... political chaos in Italy and then of the warring factions in Greece was nothing short of masterly. Richard Crossman, then assistant chief of psychological warfare at AFHQ, concluded in a shrewd single sentence: ‘I suspect it was in Algiers, where he could do all the thinking and take all the decisions while Ike took all the credit, that Harold Macmillan ...”

“... en route home I generally stop and have some tea at Bettys in Ilkley where I also buy an organic white loaf. Today the assistant tells me that the café (and presumably the four or five other branches in the Bettys chain) no longer does organic produce as they’ve changed their flour miller. ‘However,’ she assures me, ‘the flour is locally ...”

“... boatloads of hands pushed off for granite quarries on the islands, and left dozens of bleak white frame houses stuck like oyster shells on a hill of rock, and below us, the sea lapped the raw little match-stick mazes of a weir, where the fish for bait were trapped. Six years later, Bishop sent Lowell a postcard from the Art Institute of Chicago of ...”

“... apparent eagerness to wage nuclear war. Their campaign had a considerable impact, and when Richard Nixon got to the White House four years later he was convinced that scientists were a dangerously anti-Republican political lobby. Nixon shut down the Office of Science and Technology, and kicked the presidential ...”

“... fourth century BC and was being reared in Egypt under the Ptolemies. The Romans preferred the white variety, but the German goose is described by Pliny. Specialists often have difficulty in distinguishing between the bones of wild and domesticated birds.’ And: ‘The expansion of the glass industry is particularly well documented, but it is probable ...”

“... one would expect from his 1970 admiration of Truffaut’s L’Enfant Sauvage, with its black and white photography and its old-fashioned use of the shrinking iris to close a scene by picking out a detail: ‘The serious way in which circle-outs centre one’s vision on a detail of the image is also a kind of affection towards its objects, in stark contrast ...”

“... will to literature received its fullest critical acknowledgment in the period between Richard Ellmann’s 1959 biography of Joyce and Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era (1971). Kenner’s book, based in part on interviews with Pound, presents itself as a parting glimpse of an age of demi-gods. It marvellously exhibits, by a vivid survey of ...”

“... It is perhaps significant that when her daughter showed the manuscript of these memoirs to Richard Buckle, who was preparing the Penguin edition of his life of Nijinsky, he did not think it necessary to change his own evaluation. But he was fascinated by Nijinska’s memories of her brother’s hitherto unrecorded early childhood. One sees why: they ...”

“... to the US to decide what constitutes allowable and non-allowable changes. A like-minded colleague, Richard Pipes of Harvard, suggested that the new Administration reclassify the world into two simple camps: pro-Communist nations and anti-Communist nations. If the return to the Cold War seems on one level to entail a new assertiveness, it has also encouraged a ...”

“... into an ideology, neutralising living questions, and flattening them into the equivalent of the White Paper. And, yes, I admit that I want my Hamlet critics to have at least some sense of sex and violence, some power to evoke what Empson, in his 1953 essay, called Hamlet’s ‘crazy magical behaviour’. Various doubts creep in about the account of the ...”

“... of laughter and affection, counting her kisses, when I was six’; as a stiff little figure in white muslin and a black sash, in mourning for the German Emperor; as an efficient chaperon, bustling her small seasick brother up into bracing deck air. Her own description of Lancaster Gate in Olivia has the same critical tendency as her brother’s, but is ...”

“... blame for Plath’s death. In this story, Plath arrives at Cambridge immaculate, with her gold and white Samsonite luggage, her neat Smith College clothes, her shiny freshly-washed blond hair. And England drags her under, dirties her, releases the true poetic self, which is ‘aggressive, rude ... disorderly, sexual’. In death she is ‘the little defeated ...”

“... different times (and by different factions at the same time) of being a terrorist, a centrist, a White agent, a Nazi agent, a Stalinist agent, a social democrat, a Trotskyist, even (gulp) a Gaullist. After his death in 1947 he was forgotten for decades, being useless to either side in the Cold War – all probity and no PR. Susan Weissman is even more ...”

“... Frankenstein … obsessed with one xenophobic idea’. ‘There was disquiet across the white world,’ de Bellaigue writes, at Mossadegh’s ‘show of Oriental bad form’. The Foreign Office started a campaign to persuade the American public of the rightness of the British cause and the US press duly fell in with it. The New York Times and the ...”