“... mood of a particular time and class. His protagonists fret about la vie quotidienne (they use the French) – ‘What made us think that we could escape things like bankruptcy, alcoholism, being disappointed, having children?’ – as well as their feelings of political powerlessness. ‘I make small campaign contributions to the candidate of my choice and ...”

“... so intellectual supporters of the Iraq War – among them Michael Ignatieff, Leon Wieseltier, David Remnick and other prominent figures in the North American liberal establishment – have focused their regrets not on the catastrophic invasion itself (which they all supported) but on its incompetent execution. They are irritated with Bush for giving ...”

“... be accepted at the outset. Anyone – to be more specific, mountebanks like Daniel Goldhagen and David Cesarani – with not a lot to say, but with a will to dilate about atrocity, can extort a hearing for themselves. Others, with more to say, seem to have a clause in their contracts demanding that they mention it at least once in any article, be it on ...”

“... He’s invariably linked with a group of US fiction writers around his age that includes the late David Foster Wallace, George Saunders, Jonathan Franzen and Jeffrey Eugenides. There are a few things that set Antrim apart: he’s Southern; his strongest affinity to a writer in the previous generation is to Donald Barthelme, not Don DeLillo; he’s the least ...”

“... is demonstrated and evil is overcome.’ The German oak came to stand for such victories. Caspar David Friedrich’s The Solitary Tree (1822) shows a battered oak in the foreground, damaged by the storms of the French invasion and the Napoleonic Wars but still in full leaf on its lower branches, providing shelter for a ...”

“... in Assad’s inner circle feared that Syria would be next). According to Assad’s biographer David Lesch, ‘Damascus wanted the Bush doctrine to fail, and it hoped that Iraq would be the first and last time it was applied. Anything it could do to ensure this outcome, short of incurring the direct military wrath of the United States, was considered fair ...”

“... more mysterious. They have been the subject of two previous books, by Mollie Gillen (1972) and David Hanrahan (2008), both called The Assassination of the Prime Minister. Linklater doesn’t add much information or evidence about the event itself, but he puts it in context, and provides fascinating if overblown speculations about the supposed ...”

“... only five other women in total (there were 60 men). She has seldom been included since. In 1970, David Shapiro and Ron Padgett’s anthology An Anthology of New York Poets left her out, but by then the so-called ‘second generation’ looked very different, and little of their style or substance can be traced to Guest’s influence. In Women, the New York ...”

“... aptly termed the ‘crispation de nerfs’ in the painter’s work. In 1985, one art historian, David Lubin, turned the picture into an occasion for some psychosexual fantasising. Lubin also tried to answer the riddle Sargent had posed by deviating from a main source for the picture: Velázquez’s Las Meninas, one of ten works by Velázquez he copied on a ...”

“... September and October the greatest defeats in its history, capturing more prisoners than the French, Belgians and Americans put together … This is always forgotten. Wish I could tell you more – about horses! About mules! Yes, the poor bloody mules! My own study of the reminiscences of those who fought in France suggests that while Lewis’s zest for ...”

“... slide into imperialism. Later generations used Macaulay’s arguments to justify British – or French, German and most recently American – territorial, economic and cultural colonialism: liberal imperialism, as it became called. His other main legacy was the way his particular interpretation of English history ...”

“... for its being a guide for stewards and landowners. (You don’t need a spatula to enjoy Elizabeth David.) There was an ash tree outside our house in Kentish Town: I know because I had to ask the council to lop away some of the upper growth as it came closer to the bedroom window. (The ancient tree in James’s story is uncomfortably close to the window of the ...”

“... itch, strategic paranoia, unvarnished greed, missionary zeal, scientific inquiry, dishing the French (or the Russians) – and the forms it took were too hopelessly various to fit a single model. The peopling of Australia with British emigrants, for example, had almost nothing in common with Britain’s rule – with a very small number of personnel ...”

“... There is a good answer in the argument James conducted with W.K. Clifford, brilliantly explored by David Hollinger in an essay in The Cambridge Companion to William James. Clifford had said that it is wrong in all cases to believe on insufficient evidence, a claim James thought ‘thoroughly fantastic’ because it excluded most human action most of the ...”

“... of her time at Cambridge that she got her own first ‘dusty answer’. She fell for the dashing David Keswick, who seemed so ‘very, very smitten’ that after one kiss she knew they would be together for ever. She was devastated when he explained he had been engaged to somebody else for years. She renounced love and made a short, disastrous marriage on ...”