“... support, in turn rejecting the Taliban. To that end, the British ambassador has just said that we may be here for thirty years. I started mentioning this idea and got scorn or sarcasm from the soldiers every time. One lieutenant colonel even said that if I found any of the Foreign Office or Development people in charge of all this reconstruction, would I ...”

“... the world of ‘my mother’s taste’. My whole life up to now – as even the slow-witted reader may have deduced – has from one angle been a fairly heartless repudiation of maternal sentimentality: all the bright, powerless, feminine things. Now especially, her world is largely one of kitty cats, splashy floral bedspreads and pillow shams, Mrs See’s ...”

“... to the ground. Hence people born when I was, towards the end of April or in the first weeks of May, are home-lovers, green-fingered, deeply conservative, routine-loving, inexorable, well-throated, prone to kidney disorders, peasants. On the other hand, we are also ‘ruled’ by the planet the Greeks called ‘Aphrodite’, which means Venus is anciently ...”

“... its dying day. In this debacle, the party’s conduct was without international excuse. Revolution may have been ruled out in postwar Italy, but by 1946 the Allies had essentially left the country, and were in no position to halt a lustration of Fascism. Togliatti’s naivety in being so completely outmanoeuvred by De Gasperi had little to do with external ...”

“... and went out. Five minutes later she was back with a cup of tea. ‘No sugar,’ said Midgley. ‘May I?’ she said and put both lumps in her mouth. ‘Slack tonight,’ she said. ‘Still, it just needs one drunken driver.’ Midgley closed his eyes. ‘I thought you were going to be a bit of company,’ she said. ‘You’re tired out.’ She fetched a ...”

“... either criterion makes you insolvent. It is a criminal offence to trade while insolvent. There may be a get-out, however. Are you really insolvent? I’ve made things clear-cut for the purposes of this example, but you could argue – and in comparable cases people do argue – that your problem is not so much insolvency as illiquidity. Liquidity is the ...”

“... to South Africa? So it’s that bad? My translator’s brother is an apiarist in Plovdiv. He may not be an apiarist much longer, though, because this year all his bees have been born without wings. Without wings? ‘It is a mutation.’ What causes it? ‘We do not know.’ Other apiarists have found the same. Chernobyl? ‘We do not know.’ In Bulgaria ...”

“... who their father was – or at least knew that he wasn’t the one he was supposed to be – it may seem odd that divorce stood out as a social sin. But its novelty was against it. It was untraditional, new-fangled and (worst of all) above Gail’s mother’s station. Lady Kenyon (the Kenyons were the other local grandees, a lot richer and more dashing than ...”

“... on air tickets beyond that, free airport parking etc. Thabo Mbeki’s irritation with the press may have something to do with the coverage the refurbishment of his two vice-presidential mansions has elicited: rather than use the stairs to go up to his first floor, as ordinary mortals do, he has decided that he must, at vast public expense, install ...”

“... what pushed him over the top was the extraordinary quantity of pink gin he drank. Of course, there may have been other more private incitements to mania. Threading my way past the card parties, I eventually found the wardroom, actually a passenger saloon on the upper deck, designated ‘wardroom’ by a freshly painted sign, still unfinished and no doubt ...”

“... ideals of the Republic. Goldgar rightly argues that the historian reconstructing an organisation may find its malfunctions more informative, in crucial respects, than its blueprints. But Goldgar also argues that many debates proved impossible to resolve. Even within the world Of the Huguenots, disagreement raged – for example, on whether local churches had ...”

“... new self; the blindness that is true vision. The obsession with seeing, with darkness and light, may well have had its roots in the grim, coal-black inversion of life in the Nottinghamshire of Lawrence’s childhood. The life of the miner was a life of seeing in the darkness, and of emerging (in winter, at least) from underground at nightfall. Lawrence’s ...”

“... Theology. No doubt that restless instrumental intelligence has been thinking that some advantage may be gained from talking with this Dominican who so much wants his blessing for the marriage of Christ and Marx. So Fidel y la Religion sold a million copies in Cuba, where there is not so much else to read, and where curiosity about what Castro is thinking is ...”

“... matter: do not judge me, judge my programmes, they are good for you, no matter what hanky-panky I may be up to. The 1997 speech contained his brief for the defence long before Monica Lewinsky was in the news. The majority of the members of the US Congress are not easily shocked, but some Democrats and many Republicans depend for their re-election on Christian ...”

“... him, you’d find panic and emptiness in the middle’, which Strouse wouldn’t say of Morgan. He may lack any very complicated internal life, or the means of expressing it, but his story is neither empty nor dispiriting. His was a life of things and acts; feelings are recounted in the biography – depressions, infatuations, rages – but with a ...”