“... MacNeice, Dillon, Cleverdon and Bridson, and new ones like W. R. Rodgers, Terence Tiller, R. D. Smith and Rayner Heppenstall. MacNeice was henceforth one of a group of literary men whose social life revolved around certain pubs in Soho, Fitzrovia or the immediate environs of Broadcasting House. Dylan Thomas was much in use as an actor and a voice as well as ...”

“... solemn music as to approach the clerihew, something about which Hill makes a knowing joke: ‘Sir Christopher Wren, in or around the year seventeen ten, went to dine with some men, memorially, with a view to re-edifying the clerihew.’ Wren went to dine with some men in a clerihew by E.C. Bentley, the inventor of the form: ‘He said, “if anyone calls/Say ...”

“... by their peers – that much was certain. The Clarence Thomas hearings and the William Kennedy Smith rape trial had introduced cable subscribers to something called the ‘Court Channel’. This service gives non-stop live coverage to high-profile trials. Cameras were allowed into the King trial, and every minute of the daytime proceedings was covered (the ...”

“... cliché: ‘his face now a tear-stained mask.’ But the books, what do they reveal? According to Christopher Ricks, the notes to Eugene Onegin have a tone of ‘patiently patrician calm’ whose ‘coolness can easily become the condescending heartlessness which so attenuates Nabokov’s fiction’. D.J. Enright found Nabokov ‘rich in what is given to few ...”

“... after World War One’ – and went on to describe the guilt and distress felt by Septimus Warren Smith on his return home from the war. Mr Amini said: ‘What happens to him?’ ‘He jumps out of a window.’ ‘Islam doesn’t countenance suicide,’ he said with satisfaction. I said: ‘Did you take part in Karbala Four?’ ‘Why do you ask questions ...”

“... was generally not acceptable. ‘The valuation of the liberal individual in India,’ the late Christopher Bayly wrote in Recovering Liberties: Indian Thought in the Age of Liberalism and Empire (2012), was ‘impregnated with the idea of sharing, generosity and compassion … dramatised by tropes from the Indian classics, the Vedanta and particularly the ...”

“... means they are a little difficult to follow, unlike the clearly presented definitive edition by Christopher Decker in 1997 (Decker’s edition is out of print). But the changes are worth attending to: here is a poet who not only throws his voice to speak as someone else, but can’t quite settle on the pitch. This is the opening verse in his 1859 ...”

“... warlord masquerading as a merchant. In Britain, the Company was attacked by Burke and Adam Smith for combining opportunism and monopolistic greed. The Company eventually responded by building up what it saw as its moral superiority and entitlement to rule India, even if only as the ostensible representative of an absent Mughal emperor. Three ideas were ...”

“... Green told his interviewer that ‘the writer must be disengaged’, and enjoyed pointing out that Christopher Isherwood, who called Living ‘the best proletarian novel ever written’, had never worked in a factory himself. Pontifex’s own employees, having rumbled the fact that Yorke and Green were the same, weren’t so impressed. ‘I read your ...”

“... men who cannot innovate and would have rejected the Beatles, the personal computer and Christopher Columbus’s first voyage as utter lunacy. But they don’t give up. They struggle, they sweat blood, they network in coffee bars until – at last! – they get the power and the page lead in the Financial Times; the glory and the marketing ...”

“... one that he is stuck for ever in the era of the liberation struggle. During the many years of Ian Smith’s white minority regime, it seemed there was little that Mugabe’s party, Zanu, could do in the face of white power. Zanu’s armed wing, Zanla, was no match for the better trained and better equipped Rhodesians, and Mugabe dreamed in vain of driving out ...”

“... the same rhythms as the Christian [and] the whole sea shared a common destiny.’As Julia Clancy-Smith has shown, the central Mediterranean corridor remained a borderland society well into the 19th century, as tens of thousands of Southern Europeans abandoned its islands and northern edges for Muslim-majority lands, turning languishing ports such as ...”

“... The same ‘cash for questions’ controversy also later accounted for two senior ministers, Tim Smith and Neil Hamilton, who had to leave their posts at the Northern Ireland Office and the Department of Trade respectively. The paradox behind this extraordinary succession of resignations is that none of them has been for what traditional constitutional law ...”

“... her and hers.In an early story called ‘On the Day E.M. Forster Died’, the middle-aged Mrs Smith is released from the great man’s influence. Sitting in the London Library, as is her habit when her three small children are at school, she has the idea for something like the quartet. It is the book that will contain all of it: Suez, the naming of ...”

“... Aristide’s departure was at best facilitated, at worst coerced by the US and France,’ Gayle Smith, a member of the National Security Council staff under Clinton, recently said. Why such animus towards Haiti’s leader? Taking up the question of the historic French debt, Aristide declared that France ‘extorted this money from Haiti by force and ...”