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“... levels in piston engines and gas turbines paled into insignificance. You could make things you held in your hand.’ The British style of rocketry, it’s clear, did not banish the sublime. How could it, when the alternative to elegance was a fireball. But Zeus’ fire was confined to a matchbox. At first the Black Arrow launcher had no official budget ...”

“... and donors complained about his tweets criticising Israel. The billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch have donated huge sums to advance their project of converting university students to free-market fundamentalism and then placing them in positions of political power. At the College of Charleston in South Carolina, Koch money was donated on the ...”

“... who had served in the Soviet Forces were cast out by others who had avoided war service and who held that to have worn a Soviet uniform was a fatal taint. The result was the so-called Scab War, which provoked huge bloodletting between the vory and the suki (‘bitches’), as they were called – the latter conceding the heavier losses. Handelman says that ...”

“... It is not easy to say what this book is about, other than by amplifying its subtitle. It is not held together by any argument that I can see; indeed, there is practically no analysis in it. In Waller’s own words, it ‘conjures up aspects of literary life in late 19th and early 20th-century England’. One sense of ‘conjure up’ is ‘cause to appear ...”

“... a number that doesn’t include detained migrants, prisoners of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, those held at Guantánamo Bay etc.In the 1976 primaries Biden had been an early supporter of Carter. In 1980 he served as a lacklustre campaign surrogate, saying on the stump: ‘Let’s face it, Jimmy Carter is not the finest thing since wheat cakes; he’s not the ...”

“... they left almost half a century ago? Israeli historians like Benny Morris, Israeli authors like David Grossman and Amos Oz, have written eloquently of their catastrophe. But in 1950, the Israeli government passed the Absentee Property Law which still forbids Selma Tawil and the other 750,000 Palestinians from ever returning – if they left their homes in ...”

“... which he exercises over their Counsels.’ Olcott made contact with a young Buddhist called Don David Hewavitarane, who took the name Anagarika Dharmapala (‘homeless protector of the Dharma’). Dharmapala’s status in Sri Lanka today is comparable with Gandhi’s in India, but though they were of the same generation, Dharmapala’s anti-Western ideas ...”

“... Menachem Begin as Israel’s prime minister. Begin, who had organised the 1946 bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in which 91 people were killed, was the first of the frank exponents of Jewish supremacism who continue to rule Israel. He was also the first routinely to invoke Hitler and the Holocaust and the Bible while assaulting Arabs and building ...”

“... son by throwing a sharpening-steel at him in a fit of rage (the boy was the same age as his cousin David Herbert). Might it not have been male violence, as much as maternal discontent, that made Lawrence ‘abnormal’? Lawrence, like his father and uncle, was given to wild fits of rage. When confronted with nothing more threatening than a blank sheet of ...”

“... all, there is the Portrait d’une Négresse exhibited at the Paris salon in 1800 by a pupil of David, Marie-Guilhelmine Benoist. The woman’s breast is exposed, but not with any sly or coy intention – her undress seems as natural to her as her white cotton turban; and the candour of her gaze is as disarming as the dignity of her bearing is ...”

“... the institution Sidney Webb created. His thinking obviously was that socialism on the Fabian model held the future in its bones. As disinterested knowledge about the economy, society and politics systematically advanced, so would the inevitability of gradualness, wave by wave, bring in the collectivist tide. Thus Webb was unmoved by Shaw’s protests that the ...”

“... intellectual and Communist – following similar books in memory of John Cornford, Julian Bell and David Haden-Guest, all killed in the Spanish Civil War. (The present title, Beyond the Frontier, nods towards Stansky and Abrahams’s 1966 Journey to the Frontier, a reworking of the lives of Cornford and Bell.) Immediately after the war Frank became for many of ...”

“... the footstool and candelabra in the unfinished portrait of Madame Récamier when he was a pupil in David’s studio). The objects represented here can be traced from old inventories; indeed, an academic study exists devoted solely to Ingres’s eloquent mantelpieces. He shows not the slightest hint of embarrassment about the material expression of power ...”

“... he charts as being clearly pacificist rather than pacifist, albeit one in which pacifists still held an ‘honoured place’. Defencism – the creed of most British foreign secretaries – rested on the need to retain a ‘balance of power’. However, as Ceadel points out, defencists rarely stooped to define any national interest which such a balance was ...”

“... threat. With the SNP looking certain to be the main opposition party in the new Parliament, David McLetchie, the leader of the Scottish Tories, pledged to support a minority Labour administration faced with a no confidence motion, much to the consternation of Tory strategists at Westminster and Labour spin-doctors both north and south of the ...”