“... 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 ...”

“... death of her infant son, and shot herself at his grave when Jamie was fourteen.Lynne, a teacher, held the family together with prayer and potato salad. Compared to her ‘reckless, cold and mean’ father, Britney paints Lynne as passive and avoidant, unwilling or unable to leave her husband or to stand up for her daughter. Lynne’s mother, Lily, was a war ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of Animal Farm was delayed by Warburg’s shortage of paper, he maintained that Nye Bevan had held it up, fearing its effect on the outcome of the 1945 election. Later, in the days of Nineteen Eighty-Four, he kept a notebook listing the names of people he thought might be Communists. He had a conscience fit for a Jesuit confessor. After the death of his ...”

“... its persistence has to be explained away. Marxism, he diagnoses, is not a system of rationally-held beliefs. Its structure is that of myth, designed to satisfy ‘the human desire for beliefs which are at the same time scientific and unquestionable’. But the physician has been infected by the patient. Just as a fact and a truth is any opinion that ...”