“... by the opportunities gas offered to the patriotic chemist. He had a better idea than using gas to burn soldiers’ eyes and put them temporarily out of commission: he wanted, as a co-worker related, ‘something that puts people permanently out of action’. Some colleagues drew back from the idea, but Haber suggested to the High Command using the ...”

“... which hasn’t yet begun To reap the bitter harvest coming to it. Next summer if the inner cities burn Some dolt will say we spend more than we earn. And over there the Loyal Opposition Is catastrophicaily split between Survivors who’ve long lost their sense of mission And scolds who say exactly what they mean. The former are in pitiable condition, The ...”

“... vote reflected national percentages almost exactly. But in 1988 it produced a higher vote for Michael Dukakis, against George Bush, than any other state bar one. The residents of Sherman Hill attest to a strong left-wing strain in Iowa’s politics which has been influential and may be so again. They worry about health, education, environment, with the ...”

“... streets. Founded by the charismatic Corneliu Codreanu in the 1920s, the Legion of the Archangel Michael (also known as the Iron Guard) was a fellowship of poor students, patriots, brutes and dreamers close to the peasant roots that most Romanians shared, and heavily invested in the symbolism of Orthodox Christianity. The misery and discontent of the ...”

“... When I think ideally of ‘the novel’, this is the one I recur to. One of the many pleasures of Michael Gorra’s book is that he too has loved this novel since he studied it in college, and wants to share his passion for it. He has also taught it for many years, at Smith College, and he has written the kind of patient, sensitive, acute study that gifted ...”

“... Raymond McCreesh, Joe McDonnell, Martin Hurson, Kevin Lynch, Kieran Doherty, Thomas McElwee and Michael Devine – starved themselves to death in the months that followed. During that summer of 1981, the Northern Ireland crisis came closer than ever before or since to carnage. Levels of mob as well as of subversive violence were high. In Dublin two thousand ...”

“... Kipling’s concerns and his allusion to Lear’s purifying ‘wheel of fire’, which will ‘burn the enhampering body’ and ‘scald like molten lead’, is disquieting in the context of his exhilaration at ‘the ignition of the dynamite’ that ‘indicts an overplus of humanity’ in Timon’s genocidal wish to see ‘the race die’. ‘The ...”

“... to be funny. I suppose otherwise they’d never laugh at all. In their biography The Real Romney, Michael Kranish and Scott Helman write that ‘within the family, Romney’s zany side was well known.’* They give two examples: Romney assuming ‘the voices of cartoon characters’ in letters home from Bordeaux, where he was a missionary in the late ...”

“... the political journalist as man of letters. He would have been entirely at home with the slash-and-burn style of the early partisan quarterlies, such as the Edinburgh or the Westminster, disposing of shoddy Romantic poetry and shoddy arguments in favour of the slave trade or the unreformed House of Commons with equal gusto, in a style two parts Hazlitt to one ...”

“... a sudden Damascene vision, not a long, difficult period of negotiation. ‘Of course, we did not burn traditional things in the village,’ Cornelius said. ‘We were much more sensitive – we don’t do things like that any more. That was the old approach.’ But if that was right, what had happened to all the nose tusks? The first permanent settlement ...”

“... knows, the relief of that, the pub, the slope down into Newman Passage, the opening sequence of Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom, a puddle of bloody neon, awkward stone setts, smokers in doorways; and then out, immediately, into another world, Newman Street. Black leather, chrome, complimentary coffee. Film, television, advertising. Bikers with ...”

“... stories he told. Only four days after the Birmingham speech, Ann Dummett, wife of the philosopher Michael Dummett and a community relations officer in Oxford, wrote to the Times that the anecdote about the widow from Wolverhampton had been recounted to her in Oxford recently, but about an old lady in London: ‘Almost every circumstantial detail was the ...”

“... mixing relatively safe bottom ash with the contaminated fly ash that the process was introduced to burn off and neutralise. The end product was then used in road building, and in the manufacture of the breeze blocks out of which dormitory estates are assembled. Waltham Abbey and its satellites as Pompeii and Herculaneum. The defoliant Agent Orange, fifty ...”

“... them for another decade, and at the end of his life, after some hesitation, he decided not to burn all the similarly revealing diaries that he had written subsequently but instead to leave them for the enlightenment of posterity, as though belatedly letting the cat out of the bag. ‘Let the world know me,’ he wrote in the diary, ‘but only when ...”

“... now that the attorney general has dropped his case against the former national security adviser Michael Flynn, even though Flynn has already twice pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his conversations with the Russian ambassador. This move by the traditionally non-partisan Department of Justice leads more than two thousand former DOJ employees to sign ...”