“... when launching operations.The exact number of US special forces is classified, but there are more today than ever before, and they are deployed in almost every country in the world. The point of covert action, of course, is that we’re supposed to know very little about it. But here the system falls down, since even secret operatives can’t help the ...”

“... there is also something in Ulster straightness – a dour literalism – which repels groups more accustomed to the sunny give and take of everyday evasion and hypocrisy. During the Troubles the outside world found it easier to romanticise the Provisional IRA than to sympathise with the resilient negativity of Ulster Unionism. Unsurprisingly, Unionists ...”

“... was reading his mind.’ There is a section break, and Byatt continues: ‘Dorothy had indeed, more or less accurately, followed Philip’s thoughts. She did not know how she had done that. She was a clever, careful child, who liked to think of herself as unhappy.’ We have instantly entered, with the finality of fairy tale, a familiar Byattian world, in ...”

“... Autobiography, published nearly twenty-five years ago, remains an indispensable pioneering work; more recently John Pilling’s Autobiography and Imagination provided some interesting studies of particular autobiographies by eminent Anglophone or Continental writers but without much discussion of the nature of autobiographical form. Jerome Hamilton Buckley ...”

“... Christen Købke (1810-48); while in 2014-15 the National Gallery showcased the less well-known but more extraordinary Peder Balke (1804-87): one of those rare artists whose pictures became smaller as he got older, and whose scraped, scratched grey-and-black oil-on-board images of the Northern Lights are among the most surprising pictures I’ve seen in the ...”

“... After the first death,’ Dylan Thomas wrote, ‘there is no other.’ I know what he is getting at, I suppose, but it isn’t true, at least not for me. I have had other deaths, but the death last month of my friend Michael Rogin was a shock. It’s not that we had, in recent years, spent much time together. I left Berkeley, where we taught together on the faculty of the University of California, in the mid-1990s, and almost immediately lost touch with most of my network of friends ...”

“... and canons to the left and right volley and thunder, this dignified Fellow of Balliol has done more to change our view of the 18th century than many avowed canon-chargers with more ostensibly up-to-date artillery. In the production of these two anthologies Lonsdale changes, not just a book list, but our view of the ...”

“... himself never published and which appears in Additional Poems, after Last Poems and the posthumous More Poems, there does appear an almost inevitable element of self-cultivation. The poem opposite, also of four lines, is a different matter. Now to her lap the incestuous earth       The son she bore has ta’en. And other sons she brings to birth ...”

“... this in a novel way. The most recent stage in Gaia’s evolution, he says, began in 1712, when Thomas Newcomen succeeded in building the first practical steam engine for pumping water. Newcomen’s engine ran on coal, and his invention set in motion an ongoing chemical interaction. Many early steam engines, including Newcomen’s, were used to control ...”

“... addled Mary as the wellhead of wealth scarcely to be imagined is part of legend. To the admirable Thomas Cubitt goes the major credit for replacing Mary’s Thameside swamps with the patrician squares and terraces of Belgravia. Meanwhile John Nash, no foe to the rich, was erecting the haughty villas of Regent’s Park and designing a far finer Regent Street ...”

“... repertoire, to compose orchestral pieces, to write scores for ballets or settings for Dylan Thomas poems, however, is well beyond the competence of other stars in the firmament, even Paul McCartney. There have been various, normally embarrassing attempts by rock groups, or ex-members of rock groups going solo, to explore musical ‘concepts’ and ...”

“... wrote in his diary. ‘It no longer mattered that I was a foreigner, that my English was broken. More than anything else we all wanted to defeat the Nazis.’Forty-Ninth Parallel (1941), their next film, was intended to convince US audiences of the need to join the war; it also showed the British government that movies could play an important part in the war ...”

“... long, several thousand tonnes of opium were being grown in India every year, using new and more efficient methods; India would henceforth supply most of the opium consumed in East Asia and China. The amount of opium imported into China increased from about two hundred chests a year in the 1730s to sixty thousand a year in the 1880s. The industry had ...”

“... in our house when I was a teenager and they both offered glimpses of the world outside that were more intense, more useful, than anything on television or on albums or in ordinary books. One was The Penguin Book of Contemporary Verse, edited by Kenneth Allott. It had been published first in 1950, with a second edition in ...”

“... on, and attribution of responsibility is still hotly contested. The conclusion, which becomes more troubling the more you think about it, is that nobody entirely understands the Flash Crash. The Flash Crash was the first moment in the spotlight for high-frequency trading. This new type of market activity had grown to ...”