“... government buildings, cathedrals and a monastery. Immediately outside it was the China Town, the major trading centre, and the ‘beautiful square’, also known as Red Square, on which Ivan built the Cathedral of the Protecting Veil, or St Basil’s, to celebrate his victory of 1552 over the Khanate of Kazan. From then on, the Kremlin played a leading role ...”

“... version seems a plausible paraphrase of their role as enablers rather than policemen. Really major scandals make even the biggest countries appear to shrink to the size and social homogeneity of, say, the Isle of Man. The effect is greatly enhanced when the mass media all take to singing the same tune and, from here in Seattle, Britain now looks more ...”

“... Archimedes’ death is the one fixed point in his biography: the 12th-century Byzantine scholar John Tzetzes gives a birth date of 287 BC. That may be correct, and it may also be correct that his father was an astronomer. But everything else is uncertain. We can, however, say something about the world he lived in. Syracuse and Tarentum were among the ...”

“... A man of deep culture and reading in many languages, Edward Luttwak has at least three major personae – strategist, journalist and scholar. His practical experience of contemporary policy and defence is reinforced by an almost professional knowledge of military history, particularly in antiquity and the Middle Ages, and he expounds his views in lively prose that gives maximum exposure to the most eccentric of them ...”

“... In the spring of 1974, as reports multiplied of his involvement with crooks such as John Poulson and T. Dan Smith, Reginald Maudling disappeared to Paris with his wife, Beryl. The Daily Mail’s Harry Longmuir had little difficulty locating him in the ‘Président’ suite of the George V. Checking in himself, Longmuir spent a whole Sunday morning with a confused, disorientated Maudling in his dressing-gown ...”

“... veterans at its core, including the legendary fighter pilot and theoretician of conflict Colonel John Boyd, argued that the complex and expensive weapons systems championed by the Pentagon and its industrial partners were inevitably unreliable and often ineffective in combat. Instead, they advocated cheaper, simpler and thoroughly tested systems such as the ...”

“... Essex’s Irish campaign in 1599; he took with him a verse-letter from his university friend John Donne, though for Rutter ‘it’s anyone’s guess how, as a soldier headed into a guerrilla war, he read the fantastically tortured images Donne wrapped around ideas of astonishing crassness.’ By the spring of 1601, however, Wotton had abandoned his ...”

“... their own bugles to blow. In March 1916, as America was edging towards intervention in Europe, Major MacArthur was appointed head of a new Bureau of Information, with the secret mission of preparing the American public for conscription if, as the Army fervently hoped, the US entered the war. His mother again in tow, MacArthur moved at army expense into the ...”

“... in the 1990s was self-imposed. But as Georgina Born makes clear in her definitive analysis of the John Birt and Greg Dyke eras, the consistent impetus came from government. It’s no surprise that Margaret Thatcher wanted to take on the BBC – if anything, the surprise is how long it took her. (In her first term, Thatcher’s main concern was with BBC ...”

“... One of John Cheever’s most famous stories is called ‘The Swimmer’. It is set, like much of his fiction, in the lawned suburbs somewhere outside New York City, and it is filled, like most of his fiction, with despair. The hero, Neddy Merrill, the father of four daughters, is sitting by a neighbour’s pool drinking gin when the idea comes to him that he might reach home by doing a lap of all of his neighbours’ pools on the way ...”

“... wen, and with the end of the Neapolitan kingdom the Bourbon Court which had been one of its few major sources of direct or indirect employment disappeared. Camorra, a network of clientage underpinned by the threat of violence, gave a certain paradoxical order to this explosive situation. Nothing comparable appears to have existed in Sicily until the ...”

“... Emersonian connection’, ‘the Emersonian position’, ‘the Emersonian inclination’. A major aim of The Renewal of Literature is to establish what, or rather who, he has modified: among poets, Whitman, Frost and Stevens; among critics and theorists, John Hollander, Harold Bloom, Stanley Cavell, George ...”

“... give to the event. In this they differ, not only from some kinds of art-photograph, but from the major part of the tradition of photo-journalism. Christopher Killip’s photographs of the Isle of Man have been published by the Arts Council in a volume so beautifully printed that it is a work of craft to be admired in its own right. The pictures sit in the ...”

“... the new regime, Margaret’s Foreign Secretary. He is now the Secretary-General of Nato. Five major posts and still a failure? We should first examine Dr Cosgrave. I wrote earlier that the author had been both within and without the Conservative Party, first as a functionary employed in the Research Department of Conservative Central Office, and later, in ...”

“... The collection edited by Peter Quennell has some attractive photographs and two good essays, by John Bayley and Martin Amis. For the rest, there is a lot of laborious exegesis, which might have amused the recipient of the tribute, and a thought-provoking piece by Alfred Appel Jr, who knew Nabokov well and is steeped in his work. The thought provoked is that ...”