“... of air power was to ‘attack the will of the enemy’s people’. ‘Whatever the civilian may desire or squeak for, to put it vulgarly, in the next great war he is going to be “in the soup”, and what kind of soup will it be? A pretty hot one!’ It could plausibly be argued that the readiness of British statesmen to allow the dismemberment of ...”

“... of her look at all alike,’ Stephen Schiff wrote of Muriel Spark in 1993. ‘In one she may seem a sturdy English rose, in another a seductress staring down at her prey, in still another an intellectual prankster peeking wryly over her spectacles, and sometimes she looks merely square and oatmeal-faced, grinning wholesomely into too much ...”

“... had for a time been convinced that all those emancipated should be repatriated to Africa, which may be why he stresses the Ethiopian origins and African colours, yellow, red and green, of the turban of the ancient slave who catches the attention of Sherman’s soldier in ‘Ethiopia Saluting the Colours’. In the end the Galaxy never published ‘Ethiopia ...”

“... and politicised, the protection of established positions has become a top priority. Consensus may be further off than ever on who was found inside the golden boxes in the structure that Andronikos, with all too prescient ambiguity, proclaimed ‘Philip’s ...”

“... internal divisions. Calls for revenge for Dogali helped Crispi win parliamentary support in May 1889 for the occupation of the Tigrayan towns of Keren and Asmara, then Adwa, and the proclamation of the colony of Eritrea in January 1890. Enthusiasm for the new colony faded when Crispi fell from power, but quickly revived when a string of Italian ...”

“... The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, as well as The Passion of New Eve which followed, may seem like excursions. Their successor, The Bloody Chamber, a collection of stories extrapolated from folk and fairy tales which appeared in 1979, not only restored her popularity but brought her to the wider audience her work still enjoys. It was arguably a ...”

“... types, must have their trappings lovingly catalogued. That’s something historical romance may share with fantasy: its small details are important for the reality effect, whether or not they serve any purpose where story or character are concerned. The artificiality of her Regency novels seems to have been part of their appeal for her; those were the ...”

“... the structures that sustain our law-abiding bourgeois lives, it becomes entwined with and may eventually end up both inhabiting and inverting those structures. This is clearly the case in Sicily and Mexico, but it’s also in its own small way the case here, in this office in a dull Northern town. There’s a huge bottle of champagne on the ...”

“... our own. One can hear the hinge of history creaking, with Bradlaugh rattling at the doorknob. What may seem in retrospect so surprising is how popular he remained throughout his struggles, among a far wider public than his fellow atheists and republicans. When he was ill with Bright’s disease towards the end of his life, several churches offered up prayers ...”

“... it was three years before he felt able to admit the scale of the disaster. ‘By the beginning of May 1988,’ he wrote to party members, ‘we lost 13,310 troops in Afghanistan; 35,478 Soviet officers and soldiers were wounded, many of whom became disabled; 301 are missing in action … Afghan losses, naturally, were much heavier, including the losses among ...”

“... from the House of Commons at any time before the refusal of supply against an invading army in May 1640’. In recent decades the ‘new British history’ – first summoned into being by J.G.A. Pocock – has transformed our understanding of the English past. You can’t understand England without appreciating how the interactions of the four nations ...”

“... Gyurcsány tried to balance the books. In a speech to a party meeting behind closed doors in May 2006, not long after his coalition’s election victory, he admonished his fellow socialists: they had been lying to the country about the state of the economy – ‘no country in Europe has screwed up as much as we have.’ It was time to tell people to ...”

“... a ticket at the official rate,’ he boasted to me, ‘and Iksanov says I can’t dance.’* In May, his lawyer threatened to sue the theatre in response to the reprimands he had received from Iksanov for speaking out. On 7 June, Zavtra broke the news that his two contracts with the Bolshoi, as performer and teacher, had been cancelled. The next day he ...”

“... on the shoulders by two plain-clothes policemen. In The Removal (1928, above), a family that may have overstretched itself by renting a house with a small front garden is being evicted for non-payment – an event Lowry, a rent collector by profession, must have witnessed often, perhaps often initiated. Their furniture is outside, divided into two ...”

“... his true and better nature when he joined the great cause of opposition to Philip. Worthington may have promised a critical inquiry that would avoid the moralising of the past, but his account is only slightly more nuanced in its approval of Demosthenes than those of his predecessors. He passes hurriedly over problematic twists and turns in the late phase ...”