“... and his supporters have a strong case. Soviet expansion is not confined to the Baltic and the North Sea: rather it is likely to pose an increasing threat outside the Nato area. But, given Britain’s economic plight and the additional burden of defending the Falklands for an indefinite period, it is hard to see how Mr Speed’s requirements for a ...”

“... effect won the war to liberate Zimbabwe, but its capital’s street names are a bizarre mélange. North of Selous the next avenue is Livingstone; then comes Herbert Chitepo, named after an African leader martyred in the struggle. To the south, Baker and Speke intrude between Samora Machel and Mugabe. Since those two famous explorers never came anywhere near ...”

“... by the return of hostages, the US and allies’ refraining from joint military exercises, and the North Korean destruction of test facilities. The process has only just begun, but the foreign policy establishment, from the Council on Foreign Relations to Fareed Zakaria, have struck an odd posture by declaring peaceful relations with ...”

“... the indigenes in comfort’. The British bombed revolutionaries in Egypt and Pathans on India’s North-West Frontier in 1915. After the First World War, the future of the British Air Force was guaranteed by Mohammed Abdille Hassan, the troublesome ‘mad Mullah’ of Somaliland, who was bombed into submission within a week. Arthur (Bomber) Harris was a ...”

“... and to prevent the establishment of a preponderance of hostile forces on the opposite side of the North Sea and the Channel or across the Irish Sea. Elizabethan England and Spain had come into conflict because that balance of power – with its attendant threat to the safety of the seas and to England herself – had tilted in Spain’s favour. Throughout the ...”

“... to seem. But a change has come about. The wealthiest and most powerful in Europe, Australasia and North America have turned the myth to their advantage. In this version of Robin Hood the traditional poor – the unemployed, the disabled, refugees – have been put into the conceptual box where the rich used to be. It is they, the social category previously ...”

“... of his rage at intrusions into his privacy, and one remembers him forcing the withdrawal of John Peter’s article from Essays in Criticism because it suggested a homosexual element in his relationship with Jean Verdenal. Lyndall Gordon reports a conversation with Mary Trevelyan which makes him seem mildly amused about this imputation, but his first ...”

“... between the appearance of Thomas Pynchon’s first book and the Beatles’ second long-player, John Williams, a professor at the University of Denver, sent his agent in New York a draft of his latest novel, which detailed the unhappy marriage, undistinguished career and early death from cancer of an imagined professor at the University of Missouri a ...”

“... building, a 16th-century revision of the 13th-century church founded by the Knights of St John. The Hole is a statement and it is properly capitalised. The labourers, a self-confessed art collective, work the Hole by hand, with pick and shovel, turn and turn about: four days to complete a grave shaft, without any of the tortured grinding and ...”

“... skies over Thanet were the most beautiful in Europe. Thanet has two parliamentary constituencies, North Thanet and South Thanet, and a single local council, also called Thanet. Otherwise ‘Thanet’ is a concept linking three seaside towns that live side by side without surrendering their individuality, like three people sharing a flat. There’s ...”

“... TV. With all its virtues of sympathy and sensibility, this biography is much too long. A suburban North London childhood (Scott was born in 1920), a mother with a devouring emotional passion for the second son she regarded as a prodigy almost from birth, unremarkable schooldays, equally unremarkable experiments in homosexuality, bad youthful poems, accounts ...”

“... vote was quickly extended to the majority of British men, and he started his political life as North-East organiser and agitator for the Social Democratic Federation. It was cruel work, and he found the narrow, sectarian approach of the SDF unconvincing and unattractive. Before long he was on his way south to take part in the event which shaped the rest of ...”

“... inexhaustible. He makes careful and instructive discriminations on the place of Hebrew as a north-west semitic language in the ancient Near East; on the specialised and archaic language of Biblical poetry, the stylised language of Biblical narrative, and the inferred vernacular of the Biblical period; on the watershed changes from Biblical to rabbinic ...”

“... is healthier than in most mainland cities of its size. Belfast will never be the Athens of the north, but compared to Dublin, which is looking more like its Naples all the time, it seems trim and buoyant, with an almost manic optimism in the air, the irrational euphoria of the survivor. If our towns, like the French, adopted the custom of listing their ...”

“... for whom a palpably existent house is more important than a precise location. (The writer John Ryle reports a novel spin on this: he was shown round the house by a guide who maintained adamantly that it had once been the home of Rembrandt.) On the day of the inauguration Harar was abuzz with dignitaries and a concomitantly heavy presence of police and ...”