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“... which simply reinforced the point that socialists could not see a joke. It was, in short, a major propaganda coup for the Conservatives to link a satirical view of Cripps’s own persona with the hardships of the era, and to assert that postwar austerity was imposed on the long-suffering British people not through necessity but through choice. This is ...”

“... London – to which superstar American CEOs were lured with the promise of an audience with Elton John and the king in St Paul’s Cathedral (proof, apparently, that Britain is ‘open for business’, or more plausibly that desperate times call for desperate measures) – Starmer switched to a clumsier metaphor. ‘We are in the business of building on our ...”

“... system was by then so fragile that the removal of faith in its nuclear programme played a major part in its eventual downfall. Piers Paul Read picks out, then weaves, these two themes with skill and sometimes – notably in his description of the explosion itself – with the vigour of a superior thriller writer. He seems to tire towards the ...”

“... turned historians’ attention to the actual evolution and functioning of the Soviet system. Some major contributions to the economic and social history of the Soviet Union in the Thirties have resulted. Historians such as R.W. Davies, Sheila Fitzpatrick and Moshe Lewin have in different ways substantially revised the conventional picture of the ...”

“... in Soviet politics accurately? The political and ideological gulf dividing East and West is a major obstacle to objective analysis. The fact that the USSR is generally perceived in the West as the main threat to its security and its way of life inevitably distorts the perspective from which Soviet society is viewed, if only because the focus of attention ...”

“... Interviewers are instructed not to: ‘Interview more than one candidate at a time. Conduct the major portion of the interview during a meal. Ask questions about age. Ask about marital status. Ask about children. Ask about religion. Ask about national origin. Display boredom. Doodle.’ Interviewees are warned not to: ‘Slouch. Mumble. Use terms such as ...”

“... which Fisk says it was under Mr de Valera? The answer can only be: yes and no. Each of the major political parties in the Republic officially endorses the de Valera view that neutrality is in a vague and unspecified way conditional, a praxis. If attacked by outsiders, however, it can on occasion assume the status of a principle. Fianna Fail went ...”

“... achieve the transformation many groups and individuals hope for; that his efforts to implement major reforms are being blocked by conservative opponents or simply paralysed by the inertia of the system; or that he has so far been clearing the ground for fundamental changes whose details are still being worked out. Only time will tell where the truth ...”

“... enemy together. But now I need someone to hate, so that I can find some friends again. But who? A major in the propaganda section of an artillery regiment testifies to the extraordinary moral authority which Andrei Sakharov exercised: ‘When I hear people accusing us of killing people over there I could smash their faces in. If you weren’t there and ...”

“... clear that the 2008 debate season is fitting the pattern of every series since the early 1980s. No major, Gerald Ford-type gaffe, no obvious, Reagan-like knockout blow, but a careful, well-rehearsed negotiation for minute advantage, contests in which confidence, body language, expression, and even forms of address have proved as important as points of ...”

“... Why, in the great majority of animals, are there equal numbers of males and females? For John Arbuthnot, writing in 1710, it was evidence of the beneficence of God: ‘for by this means it is provided, that the species may never fail, nor perish, since every male may have its female, and of a proportionable age.’ But while that might do for man, it will hardly do for those many species in which there is no monogamous pair bond and no parental care, and in which one male can fertilise many females, and yet which have an equal sex ratio ...”

“... Emperor Rudolph II, who sat in his high palace in Prague communing with the stars and tried to get John Dee to put him in touch with the heavenly orders. True, there had been Pope Paul III, a politician if ever there was one and founder of the Counter-Reformation: he retained an astrologer to tell him, I suppose, when it was prudent to launch the Society of ...”

“... had it that a plain-clothes policeman was always on hand to see who read it). It was a major municipal asset, but the apparatus of tickets, hard-faced, uniformly aproned assistants, application forms and punitive fines was a deterrent to the uncertainly literate. And the stock of popular fiction (anything lower than, say, Denis Wheatley or Ursula ...”

“... the biographising of Anthony Eden is one of some interest. He offered the task to the late Sir John Wheeler-Bennett, author of many major books including a study of the Munich crisis and the official biography of George VI, who agreed on condition that he would not be expected to publish in Lord Avon’s lifetime. By a ...”

“... that poem is in some ways the centrepiece of Vendler’s book. The trouble is there’s more to John Ashbery than ‘The Painter’, ‘Drunken Americans’ and his other disquisitions on the Reflective Sublime. To compare Vendler’s choice with Ashbery’s, in the invaluable Selected Poems, is to find a troubling divergence. She gives us nothing, for ...”