“... the other three rushed off too quickly to be recognisable. So, I earmarked a portion of my travel grant for paying alert local companions and encountered only one more snake in the rest of the six-month trip. They must have been all around, but the precaution paid off. Despite the tendency of most snakes to make themselves scarce in the presence of noisy ...”

“... but was a shrewd Parliamentarian. Jenkins, bearing an old political grudge, turned instead to Michael Foot, who declined, knowing that Abse was the man for the job. Jenkins finally accepted this. Abse’s rather florid taste in waistcoats had already made him conspicuous. Tam Dalyell begged him not to ‘wear his funny dresses’ but Abse’s ...”

“... what the firm itself sold for on the open market. On the face of it, the valuation is astounding. Michael Bott, currently in charge of ” the Reading collection, said that he first thought a decimal point had gone missing. And if the Murray archive is worth those many millions, how much is the (firmly closed) Aladdin’s cave, the Faber ...”

“... is the theme of The Reign of James VI (2000), a collection of essays edited by Julian Goodare and Michael Lynch. The most radical suggestion has been made by Jenny Wormald, who regards James’s reign overall as a ‘triumphant success’, and any problems after 1603 as a consequence of English xenophobia and the outbreak of the Thirty Years’ War. Given the ...”

“... a place to eat, lives in squalor, joins Baudelaire in intoning a desperate, Pharisaical prayer: ‘Grant me the grace to produce some fine verses that will prove to me that I am not the least of men, that I am not inferior to those I scorn.’ Rilke worked on Malte for the best part of ten years. The semi-autobiographical novel describes Rilke’s initial ...”

“... years. Awaiting action against the Mexican army in Texas in 1845, the young Lieutenant Ulysses S. Grant played Desdemona. With victory over the British came a public debate about whether plays written under a shamefully hierarchical monarchy could be considered fit entertainment for true democrats. ‘Accustomed to see kings, dukes and lords daily on the ...”

“... reads like the cast-list of some bizarre Antipodean soap: Allan Stewart, wielder of the pick-axe; Michael Mates, sender of the famous watch; Norman Lamont, evictor (with some help from the tax-payer) of the tenant with too colourful a professional life; Patrick Nicholls, suspected drunk driver; Nicholas Ridley, too loquacious an advocate of anti-German ...”

“... police officers from the small town of Hull, Massachusetts, near Boston, arrived at the house of Michael and Carolyn Riley in response to an emergency call. Their four-year-old daughter, Rebecca, had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder two years earlier. When the officers reached the house, they found Rebecca sprawled on the floor next to her teddy ...”

“... as the police were fumbling with handcuffs. It was this spectacle – more than the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, after a violent altercation – that set off the demonstrations which continue in many American cities to protest against the mistreatment and killing of citizens with impunity. The Senate Select Committee report on CIA ...”

“... now two, to live with my aunt in Essex. After leaving Patrick, I went to live with a writer called Michael Alexander who took me to Afghanistan. Several ‘engagements’ (author’s inverted commas) on and she is living with Johnnie, but he wanted a child of his own before Patrick returned to live with them. So ‘when my aunt brought Patrick to the London ...”

“... Florence Nightingale. Yet Strachey himself seems less our contemporary now than he did when Michael Holroyd’s biography appeared in the late 1960s. Greeting the publication of G.E. Moore’s Principia Ethica in 1903, the young Strachey imagined that ‘the truth’ was ‘really now upon the march’ and that ‘the Age of Reason’ had dawned at ...”

“... handiwork. To that effort, this very fine book makes an important contribution. A decade ago, Michael Gordon, a reporter with the New York Times, and Bernard Trainor, a retired US Marine Corps lieutenant general, collaborated on The Generals’ War, still perhaps the best narrative history of the Persian Gulf War of 1990-91. Cobra II, a worthy ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... services. MI6 probably regarded me as a relatively tame grammar-school oik. (I went to a Direct Grant school. It had pretensions to public-school status, and boarders, but we all knew it didn’t make the grade socially.) The interview was curious, conducted in a crumbling corner of Carlton House Terrace by the spitting image of Rosa Kleb in From Russia ...”

“... parts of Wessex and across the South-East. One of Æthelbald’s diplomas, dated 736, recorded a grant he had made as ‘king not only of the Mercians but also of all provinces which are called by the general name “South English”’. The historian Frank Stenton, writing in 1943, supposed that the Mercian kings made a ‘great advance towards the unity of ...”