“... last sole-authored play, The Tempest, had been performed two years earlier). He may have used it as a pied à terre, but by the time he came to write his will, almost exactly three years later, the house had a tenant living in it. During Walker’s ownership it had also been leased to a tenant, a haberdasher called Henry Ireland, whose ...”

“... researcher’s heart would not thrill at the words: ‘Please burn this letter that no mortal eyes may read it’? Manuscripts may seem to offer the pleasures of the peephole but no serious historian would argue that personal manuscripts offer access to unvarnished, unmediated truth. Letters do not simply display our ...”

“... were committed to seeing Milosevic and other indictees convicted. But, however understandable it may be to prejudge the guilt of those accused of grave crimes and to wish to see them punished, it does not enhance one’s powers of observation. All court systems that function well do so because they are well supervised: by governments, parliaments and, most ...”

“... and upbeat report, drafted at Balfour’s request by his predecessor Winston Churchill. One may disapprove of spin, but there are limits. Balfour’s teacher at Eton, William Johnson, described him as ‘fearless, resolved and negligently great’. The sting is in the ‘negligently’; Johnson, author of the ‘Eton Boating Song’, was also the author ...”

“... to act without full or explicit orders and been praised for not ‘going by the book’. This may have allowed field commanders ‘to be creative’, but it also distorted the relationship between the army and the political leadership of the state. The example of the Golan Heights, occupied although Dayan and the government had decided not to do so, is ...”

“... of internal division that established the conditions for the recent violence in Gaza. Europeans may wring their hands at what they see on their TVs, but European policy, acting in concert with the US, bears a large measure of responsibility for what has happened. The US and some European countries, including Britain, also chose to finance, train and arm the ...”

“... were crammed into a single week that general theatre criticism is difficult. One conclusion may be that the société du spectacle itself is in serious trouble. It has become infinitely less dependable than the assorted VIP impresarios believed back in June. After six months of star preview, G8 July was launched amid horizon-beckoning packages; by the ...”

“... all, I do not see this. There are events, I speak of them, if I am to speak then it is these, if I may speak.’ This is the characteristically opaque ‘English’ idiom of Translated Accounts. Although the novel is written in English, it is not the English of native speakers: the 54 ‘accounts’ that make up the book are presented in the preface as having ...”

“... Cuvântul suppressed. The promised preface to Sebastian’s book was written after his release in May 1934, and by now he was more vehement than ever. For Sebastian the preface was ‘a tragedy . . . a death sentence’. Yet he felt bound to print it, and the book appeared in June to a barrage of criticism from all sides. Master and erstwhile disciple ...”

“... Refugee Scholars and Oxford University 1930-45, isn’t any of the great institutions that may come to mind, but Hutchinson Camp on the Isle of Man. As the result of a slightly panicky policy of interning ‘enemy aliens’ after the fall of France, large numbers of refugee German scholars – most but not all of whom were Jewish – found themselves ...”

“... at the end of it she threw caution to the winds: ‘If you disappoint me, attend to my curse: – May the hatred of all the young, beautiful, and virtuous, for ever be your portion! … may you meet with applause only from envious old maids, surly bachelors, and tyrannical parents! ...”

“... in ten parts, with beginnings, middles and end credits; and lasts 18 hours altogether, which some may feel is a lot to ask of busy, anxious wrecks who have their own troubles to patrol. Not that 18 hours on your couch, attending to war, is really so much if you need courage and history in your life. The film took ten years to make, at a cost of $30 ...”

“... have their own account of who they are and what they’re doing. The professional demographer may classify someone according to a set of categories widely recognised among experts, but unrecognisable or even offensive to the person being classified. An economist may insist that someone is maximising their welfare on the ...”

“... If you’ve spent time at any of the private colleges and universities in the US, you may have been struck by something mirage-like about the campuses: a distinct lightness of being, despite the stony masses of the buildings. It’s partly an effect of the heavy deployment of architectural pastiche to create the illusion of antiquity, but it may also have to do with the fact that many of these institutions arose as much out of vanity or whim as necessity ...”

“... He worked on the new prefaces, which he described as ‘freely colloquial and even, perhaps, as I may say, confidential’ (though James’s notion of the ‘freely colloquial’ is perhaps not everyone’s) during the years 1905 to 1909. In some respects, the venture was not a success. ‘Vulgarly speaking,’ James said of the New York Edition, ‘it ...”