“... is being used to pave the way for Turkey’s entry into the European Union. Meanwhile, in Britain, Robert Bittlestone has recently argued that Odysseus’ homeland is not modern Ithaki, but the peninsula of Paliki, now attached to Kefalonia, but once, he claims, a separate island. Geologists may manage to prove that Paliki ...”

“... supposed to (Roland Barthes: ‘Is History not simply that time when we were not born?’), and it may have an element of fiction in it. ‘We launched our marriage in guilt,’ Diana says. ‘Everyone had to be listened to, apologised to, thanked for giving us permission to live our lives. On our first day of marriage, starting our honeymoon, all we could ...”

“... looking for something interesting to investigate, though that is not wholly irrelevant. It may be true that too much has been written and published about him, but it is also true that there is a lot to write about. At the same time, however, the poet’s life, and especially the first half of it, has been examined with a persistence that is beginning ...”

“... publication in 1967 of a drastically abbreviated and expurgated edition, incompetently edited by Robert Rhodes James, which was greeted with widespread ridicule and contemptuous comparison with Nicolson. After Coats died in 1990, the diaries passed to Channon’s son, Paul, who died in 2007. Now, with the encouragement of his children, three formidable ...”

“... to the present, can help us all to feel more at home in this strange place. Nostalgic historians may be classified according to the times and places in which they locate their homes. Some, like Henry Adams, seem to discover that far country through study and then begin to remember it as their own birthplace. Others, like David Donald and Jeffrey ...”

“... after all. ‘The difference between his description and ours,’ in Richard Rorty’s words, ‘may mean that he should not be tried under our laws. It does not mean that he cannot be explained by our science.’ Realism, the doctrine that things are as they are independent of any description of them, can only be false for things which just are their ...”

“... little reason for retrospective pride: in their Vichy France and the Jews, Michael Marrus and Robert Paxton have documented how after 1942 in the South-Eastern departments the Italian occupiers were obliged to fend off not only the Nazis’ round-up but that of the French police as well.) So much for the ‘main story’, the story of Italian élite ...”

“... Evans. Chatwin understood the aesthete; and even the humbler inhabitants of What am I doing here may be pinioned by a description of dress, from the Chinese who ‘wore a blue silk Nina Ricci tie, a gold wristwatch with a crocodile strap, and an immaculate worsted grey suit’ to the immortalised functionary in London’s Afghan Embassy who ‘had cut off ...”

“... was 41, he volunteered for the Army in 1915 and served in the trenches as an infantry officer. He may have fibbed about some of his war experiences but seems on the whole to have done well despite his unsoldierly sloppiness. As Alan Judd remarks, his war service deserved more praise than it got – another instance of his chronic bad luck. Allen Tate once ...”

“... hardly matters. The first version is to my mind the best, because the most ordinary. Since the man may survive or may not, which he does makes no difference to the story. (A modern narratology expert would shake his head at that.) The frostbite vs match sequence is more detailed and graphic in the first version, and two ...”

“... one both in Nato and the Community. If Michael Heseltine can stake out a distinctive position, he may even win some of the middle opinion that Mrs Thatcher never attracted and now positively repels. His European message is certainly attractive to those in all parties who voted for Britain’s entry to the Common Market eighteen years ago, and to their heirs ...”

“... theories about Australia. Some say that it is a form of cell-block Cockney, that the Kray brothers may even now be stammering their parole appeals in infant Oz. Others contend that it must be to do with the weather: that early Australians who settled some thousand miles from each other, with no contact, and from quite different racial stocks, all began ...”

“... of The Twenties and The Thirties – Wilson’s notebooks and diaries for those decades – may have done something to further this end. Wilson had done some of the preparation for their publication before his death in 1972. The Forties is wholly edited by Leon Edel, who says in his Preface that this decade, at any rate the first half of it, is pretty ...”

“... was not accepted at once. Dyson was now joining the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, and Robert Oppenheimer, its director, at first refused to believe in the new theories, or in Dyson’s exposition. Oppenheimer usually had a very quick and deep perception, but when he did not accept an argument he could be very cutting in his comment and make it ...”

“... A chorus of woe prompted by the recession of 1980? No, all remarks made in 1948, and quoted by Robert Hewison in his forthcoming cultural history of the period, In Anger. Publishers are like farmers. When times are good – as they were spectacularly during the years after 1974 when the pound was weakest abroad – it’s difficult to get them to admit ...”