“... since these are not finite possessions but transferable gifts that can grow and change. The ego may be founded on wave upon wave of reactions and violences of which it is only partially aware, but it is also founded on words, and words can be the communicants of gentle relationships between people and nations as well as violent ones. You might feel ...”

“... conservative Midwestern town, but there is no follow-up on this broad hint. The youngest brother, Robert, stayed in Ohio. James described him as a ‘Babbitt’ – a smug materialist. He too was a published author, though his book was called The Successful High School Athletic Programme. Purdy remarked that if Robert or ...”

“... will never allow foreign bureaucrats to trample on your Second Amendment freedoms.’ The Donald may be no Adolf, but he sings the same Song of the Will. After the worst of wars, there has to be a winding down, a settlement of outstanding grievances, insisted on, whether brutally or charitably, by the victors, and resisted or grudgingly accepted by the ...”

“... number, sitting on porches, leaning against gates or laid out in store windows. These techniques may or may not work for the forgetful majority of us; may or may not illuminate the structure of the brain or of cognition; but certainly show the way we ...”

“... the Tom and Viv bits which we are all likely to home in on.’ In 2022, with the second volume of Robert Crawford’s sensitive biography, it’s the Tom and Em bits.This is unfortunate: Eliot after ‘The Waste Land’ is a rich study of the period from 1922 until Eliot’s death in 1965 – years that contained much besides a complicated love ...”

“... in order to advance their careers and secure an income. On becoming prime minister in the 1720s, Robert Walpole gave posts to six members of his family (brothers, sons and in-laws), as well as to other long-time supporters, prompting the charge that Britain was governed by a ‘Robinocracy’. As late as 1831, Earl Grey was accused of securing offices for ...”

“... Patel, would have had to go for being officially found guilty of bullying her staff; so would Robert Jenrick, the housing secretary, for a ripe lobbying scandal.As for policymaking, a concern for accuracy was supposed to go hand in hand with a thorough and detailed examination of pros and cons, a proper submission of papers and keeping of records, rather ...”

“... strange somatic symptoms he connected to stress, but was unable to explain physiologically. It may be that the terror of charging into heavy enemy fire at close range as a lone unprotected figure in the open formations of the Civil War, as opposed to the tight square formations of earlier military tactics, induced something like shellshock and contributed ...”

“... source of a quotation. Smiling, the boy fell dead. Mr Usborne, really! I thought everyone knew Robert Browning’s poem ‘An Incident in the French Camp’. Young lieutenant comes to Napoleon with the news that they have taken Ratisbon. Napoleon quite pleased. He notices that the young man isn’t looking quite himself. ‘You’re ...”

“... He established a JDL fund in Evans’s name that continued to exist into the Seventies. It may well be that Kahane’s present obsession with Arab men having sexual relations with Jewish women and his proposal of Nuremberg-style racial purity laws for Israel are at least in part a consequence of his guilt over the Evans tragedy. The attention Friedman ...”

“... of the Opposition whom it was rumoured might have been done away with by the KGB. James Bond may have come about as a defence mechanism, a charm against the way of life Fleming saw himself threatened with after his marriage; rather in the same way that Kenneth Grahame produced another potent bachelor fantasy, The Wind in the Willows, when he found ...”

“... museum contain the Holocaust only by labelling it ‘history’, a series of past crimes that we may now observe from a safe distance? What if we were to object that the Holocaust was not ‘history’? Should we then demand its removal from the sanitising grip of the museum? What, in short, belongs in a museum? On this side of the Atlantic, displays of ...”

“... gets her hair and nails done at Madame Cleo’s. She does not see what the women of Hasnapur, who may be old at 22, know: that there are no insides and no outsides. These Americans come from a place where ‘the language you speak is what you are.’ Darrel, the pig-farmer who has named his dog Shadow, asks Jane to come up with a pretty name for the golf club ...”

“... No, what scotched the Disraelian legend as serious history was the standard biography by Robert Blake in 1966. Lord Blake possesses unimpeachable credentials as the eminent chronicler of the evolution of the Conservative Party. But he maintains also irreproachable standards as an academic historian, and these made his Disraeli disconcerting reading ...”

“... attitudes to laughter for more than fifty years, and his book is clearly a labour of love. So, he may appreciate a further example, from the Qumran scrolls outlining the regulations of the Essene community not long before the time of Christ. Members of the community were required to ‘do penance’ for particular lengths of time, depending on their ...”