“... a rape to justify a revolt, Bailey wrongly tells us (twice) that Lavinia, who is ravished in the woods by princely but immigrant Goths, kills herself. In fact, she is disposed of in an even more patriarchal fashion than Lucrece: stabbed by her own father to save her from shame. The Clinton chapter ends by asserting, modishly but with no textual support, that ...”

“... before breakfast. I’d met a few of them years ago in Ealing.’That nostalgia also generates the woods filled with birdsong in which Julia and Winston have their trysts. But Orwell’s kind of nostalgia is usually nostalgia with menaces, as when he described returning from Spain tothe England I had known in my childhood: the railway-cuttings smothered in ...”

“... inside J.C. Penney’s or Costco or Safeway, they’ve looked hardly less exotic than poor Michael Dukakis did on board his ill-advised tank. But the moment that Sarah Palin stepped up to the mike at the Republican Convention in St Paul, and began talking in her homely, mezzo-soprano, Far Western twang, she showed herself to be incontestably the real ...”

“... the wind at the top of a pole. And on the day I came, there were many plums rotting on the trees.Michael Fordham, the farm’s owner, was driving a new JCB in and out of one of the barns, lifting grain into a waiting lorry. The farm where we stood was 290 acres in all. ‘But we run a further 700 acres from here,’ ...”

“... metalled roads except along a handful of known paths for ramblers and dog-walkers, often through woods or along waterways. Most of the vast mosaic will never be entered by any human being except the farmer, a trickle of contractors and, once in a while, a government official. Not that such people are often to be seen. Away from the roads, the space between ...”

“... days, via Dobris and Beroun, along a route that can be traced quite easily today, through beech-woods and apple orchards and old broken hedges rampant with snowberries, and at around midday on Monday, 6 May 1591, Kelley was handed over to the safe-keeping of the castellan of Krivoklat, Jan Jindrich Prolehofer von Purkersdorf. Krivoklat Castle, known also as ...”

“... started a new album, ‘EGYPT’. On the first page, a collage of stamps of King Farouk, who, like Michael of Romania, was a boy at his accession. The stamps are the first issue of his reign, designed in 1937. Later in the album we find the revised design of 1944, by which time Farouk was 24 and wearing a manly moustache on his rather pudgy face. The Farouk ...”

“... in power, made similar accusations against the Jews and many sects they deemed heretical. Michael Constantine Psellos, the Byzantine philosopher, wrote about the Bogomils: In the evening, when the candles are lit, at the time when we celebrate the redemptive Passion of Our Lord, they bring together, in a house appointed for the purpose, young girls ...”

“... power? Runciman is not alone in thinking they can. The same assumption can be found in the work of Michael Mann, of which Runciman has been a severe critic, but whose scale and focus invite comparison. The common source of this bias is Weber – the dominant influence on this cohort of British sociologists. Fixation with power has, of course, gone much further ...”

“... best basketball players win much more often than they lose. Even the very best golfers – Tiger Woods in his prime – lose more often than they win. Golf is a solitary business, and often a lonely one. A basketball team can dominate its opponents and its skilful play will take away from theirs. In golf you are powerless to control what your opponents ...”

“... see that,’ or again: ‘I would have done anything, given almost anything, to be taken into the woods, stripped and whipped by a fat middle-aged severe woman … such strong impossible desires. Do all men have them?’The Channons finally divorced, and Chips won custody of their son, Paul, who had been sent to America at the beginning of the ...”

“... way he and Lynch composed Laura Palmer’s theme for Twin Peaks (‘OK, Angelo, we’re in a dark woods now, and there’s a soft wind blowing through some sycamore trees’) that is the closest you’ll get to crawling inside Lynch’s head. The idea of a literary Lynch is more curious. By his own admission, he was not a big reader and his aversion to ...”

“... books about Haig and Kitchener, VAD nurses, brave dead subalterns and monocled mutineers. I read Michael Hurd’s desolating biography – The Ordeal of Ivor Gurney – on the train to Edinburgh, the city where the nerve-wracked composer, on his way to insanity and death, was hospitalised after being gassed in 1917. I stared at the few surviving pictures of ...”

“... 3.4 million inhabitants dispersed across some 345 square miles, a quarter of which consists of woods and lakes. During the Cold War, both parts received preferential treatment as showcases of their respective regimes. Subsidies were far higher in the West, where everything from factories to art shows was lavishly funded in the battle against Communism, but ...”

“... of what the EU had become. Once the campaign began, two of his leading cabinet ministers – Michael Gove the slyest and Boris Johnson the most popular of his colleagues, neither of them close to the ERG, both actuated by career rather than conviction – declared themselves for Leave.In parliamentary terms, Remain still had a winning hand, since ...”