“... top-order batsmen could not resist the Australian attack. The middle-order crumbled. Shane Warne may have looked unplayable, but Pakistan’s batsmen didn’t try very hard. The demoralised bowlers, feeling the game was in any case lost, failed to retrieve the situation. Wasim Akram said that they were outplayed and there was nothing more to it. I think, on ...”

“... Book 7) associate it with uncertainty (Aeneas earlier calls it ‘Ausonian Tiber’, whatever that may be), or with war and death – most memorably in the Sibyl’s vision (‘I see the Tiber foaming with much blood’). That sense of fear and awe is a constitutive element of Virgil’s Italy. By focusing on such details Jenkyns goes some way towards ...”

“... of intention, extremely limited objectives’ – was, in fact, enormously challenging. The book may be ‘about’ Hardy, but its aim is to contextualise a British poetry which, while having Larkin as its ‘centrally representative’ figure (Davie makes this prescient claim for Larkin very early on, in 1963), can accommodate writers such as Prynne and ...”

“... fishermen. All relationships, in Somali, are defined in terms of cognates, to the extent that we may address a total stranger as ‘cousin’, and those whom we know as ‘brother/sister’, to connote closeness. There are two broad categories into which one’s fellow Somalis fall: reer magaal and reer baadiye, the prefix reer indicating sibling status ...”

“... of history by the action of the State. It is derived from the State, not supreme over it. A State may in course of time produce a nationality; but that a nationality should constitute a State is contrary to the nature of modern civilisation’. The ethnically self-standing was the politically and morally self-stultifying. It obstructed human evolution, not ...”

“... it all: he became involved in the politics of 1848, made a speech attacking the Court, and in May 1849 appeared on the barricades alongside Bakunin. By chance (again) he escaped being imprisoned and thus avoided a likely death sentence. The rest of Mein Leben describes Wagner’s exile, spent mostly in Switzerland, but with interludes in ...”

“... book’s penultimate chapter. Tatlin’s wholly impractical monument to the Third International may not by any means have been the final triumph of Constructivism, but it did mark the climax of his influence within that movement; and it is debatable whether the ‘organic’ – i.e. curvilinear – design of his later works, like the equally impractical ...”

“... superior line on the advance and retreat of the entablature of St Mary-le-Strand (‘it may please the ignorant: but a judge would have been glad to see the entablature entire’), or to share his scorn for the pediment in the interior of that building (‘nothing can be so absurd’ as the ‘placing of an entire Pediment within-side a Building ...”

“... like Iraq for finding themselves automatically lined up on one side of the Cold War. When in May 1946 it had seemed as if the Canal was to go, the Chief of Staff had drawn up a reproachful inventory of all the Middle East countries, showing everywhere except in the Transjordan the uncertainty and fragility of Britain’s situation. Since the ...”

“... rhetorical advantage. But rhetoric only excites us and we need above all to keep calm. There may be more sinister and complex forces at work in the nuclear arms race than the need for the male to assert itself. The soldiers’ bottoms might more provokingly remind us of the part played by anality in the build-up of nuclear arsenals. ‘Cleaning up’ and ...”

“... experience is conveyed with hallucinatory conviction. To compare Ivy Litvinov with Colette may seem absurd: but although one of them purrs and the other growls, they speak the same language of female awareness. Perhaps Ivy would have come out better if a woman had written her biography: but at least this one stimulates a wish to see her work published ...”

“... versifier concludes his prejudicial attack by exclaiming: If such be ‘Artists’, then may Philistines   Arise, plain sturdy Britons as of yore, And sweep them off and purge away the signs   That England e’er such noxious offspring bore!* This is the obverse of Wilde’s threat, after the banning of Salomé, to take out French ...”

“... remarkable in military history for the fact that there were no casualties on either side. Puisaye may have given the necessary orders for the posting of sentries but his failure to check that anyone was doing anything about it allowed his little force to be surprised and routed. When the revolt in Normandy collapsed he made his way west and became one of the ...”

“... if we respect her achievements it is futile to condemn her because she was not a nicer person. We may point the finger but we should refrain from wagging it. Florence Nightingale knew many things – Edward Jenner one big thing: that a mild cowpox infection affords protection against smallpox. This observation was the origin of the vaccination procedure which ...”

“... himself be cut off by the war when he returned home to make arrangements. And, much as they may have wished to do so, he and Mary did not in 1797 become lovers. Instead of braving the worst together, they parted. There were more long visits to each other’s homes – William (and Dorothy) went to Sockburn, Mary came several times to Dove Cottage ...”