“... of his senior cabinet member is made on more than casual acquaintance. It is well-known that John F. Kennedy met Dean Rusk for the first time when he interviewed him for the job: Reagan and Haig had seen each other three times before the Election of 1980 but on only one of these occasions, shortly before Reagan’s nomination, had there been anything ...”

“... this ugly reality. Their incomplete mental adjustment to the fact of partition is the subject of John Bowman’s remarkable study. His revisionist stance may seem unnecessarily aggressive – it is after all no secret that in the private session of Dail Eireann on 22 December 1921 de Valera endorsed the so-called ‘county option’ – but he points out ...”

“... developed, to the bafflement or anger of hard-line physical-force men like O’Donovan Rossa or John O’Leary. W.B. Yeats consigned Romantic Ireland to the grave with O’Leary: Davitt discovered its terminal weakness much earlier. He outgrew the Fenian romanticism of his youth – in Moody’s words, ‘the practical revolutionist in Davitt was disgusted ...”

“... money, to invest in property: Umbria became a particular favourite, as did the high streets of major cities. Ignorant of foreign languages, unfamiliar with international banking practices, the semi-literate Calabrians could supply cocaine to distributors but turned to the Sicilians to launder their profits. With a century of experience in the export trade ...”

“... airport on 3 January, wasn’t the head of a terrorist organisation but a state official: a major-­general in Iran’s Revolutionary Guard and the leader of its Quds Force, the unit re­spons­ible for external and clandestine oper­at­ions. He was a pivotal player in the reg­ion and, at times, its most brilliant military strategist. Iran’s ...”

“... He dissected aspects of French intellectual and political life in long review-essays in the major periodicals, notably La Revue des deux mondes. Two collections of these pieces, Essais de morale et de critique (1859), and then La Réforme intellectuelle et morale de la France (1871), established him as one of the most respected commentators on the ...”

“... Marlowe’s hyperbolic flash and thunder.Marlowe has the odd distinction of being an acknowledged major playwright whose work disappeared for centuries, relegated from the mid-17th century until the 20th to the domains of antiquarian reprints and scholarly footnotes. His modern literary influence, such as it is, has been largely transmitted via his impact on ...”

“... with ‘the corduroy panzers’; dismisses the Poet Laureate as ‘poor old John Masefield’. Nor do the members of his own coterie fare much better. He is ‘wholly unsympathetic’ to Charles Williams’s mind, and although he has many warm and generous things to say about C.S. Lewis there comes a point at which he judges that ‘his ...”

“... In later years the scene darkened. There was an intellectual restlessness abroad in the college. John Maynard Keynes appeared (from Eton, indeed, where he had been in Pop), and as a very junior fellow announced that he had ‘had a good look round this place and come to the conclusion that it’s pretty inefficient.’ Plainly, rows lay ahead, and Monty ...”

“... survive in dignity, and a new novel was his only chance of getting it. Here, therefore, lies the major editorial crux of Women in Love. Did Lawrence’s feelings about homoeroticism change from 1916 to 1919, so that the Prologue became out of date and he freely discarded it? Or did he see that the truth revealed in the Prologue would destroy his career, so ...”

“... big event (and even the Serie A game between Roma and Inter postponed to the following day). Pope John Paul II is to celebrate a televised mass in St Peter’s, and then travel down to San Giovanni Rotondo to celebrate Mass there. The millions of pellegrini in attendance are to be transported by more than five thousand coaches (100 from Poland alone) and 19 ...”

“... the moral vacuum familiar at the core of today’s conurbations. If nowadays British cities and major towns just about hang together, they do so more by successive applications of sticking-plaster than inherent unity or necessity. In his epilogue, Daunton toys with the argument that cities can no longer be meaningfully identified. ‘There is no place for ...”

“... the depth of the greatest geological faultline in European civilisation. MacCulloch’s other major contention is demanding of the imaginative powers of his readers, many of whom will find themselves excluded from the mental, and especially the theological world of the 16th and 17th centuries. This was before all else a religious revolution, not to be ...”

“... restructure and reform the prisons in Iraq, including Camp Bucca and Abu Ghraib, both condemned by Major-General Antonio Taguba as the sites of ‘egregious acts and grave breaches of international law’. Or that Terry Stewart, the former director of the Arizona Department of Corrections, who began the now prohibited practice of ‘dog frights’ in the ...”

“... rented an adult film on motel pay-per-view. They were the victims of ‘total surveillance’, as John Parker calls it. Yet it mattered little – Atta’s driver’s licence may not have been in order but there were some 200,000 outstanding traffic warrants in Broward County. The attacks of 11 September both reinforced and exploded the fashionable myth that ...”