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“... Georgian society and culture in one fabulous setting. As places of commerce masquerading as wooded groves, pleasure gardens offered idealised rus in urbe. They could seem poetic in the dusk as the visitor listened to the evening chorus of resident songbirds, but were transportingly magical as night fell and hundreds, if not thousands, of lights were ...”

“... from the campus novels (more academic, not so upper-class) of, say, Malcolm Bradbury and David Lodge. Miles Tattershall lectures, with moderate success, in 17th-century literature at Cambridge. He, too, is conventional, in so far as conventions exist for fictional men of letters. Like Nick Jenkins in Anthony Powell’s sequence of novels – whose ...”

“... belief that he could impose his own terms on the Palestinians was the summit held at Camp David in Maryland in July last year. The request for the summit came from Barak – and Bill Clinton, ‘the last Zionist’ as one Israeli newspaper aptly called him, obliged. At the summit Barak presented a package which covered all the key final-status ...”

“... sounded good to her. She was envious of her clever only daughter and favoured her youngest child, David. One of Ethel’s childhood friends remembered that Tessie was ‘more bigoted than religious … If God had meant for Ethel to have music lessons, he would have provided them. As he hadn’t there was something sinful about music lessons.’ Much of the ...”

“... In the Thirties and early Forties the English poet David Gascoyne was much enamoured of the Continental, Late Romantic image of writing and of the writer as a visionary misfit. By the end of the Thirties, his place in the great Euro-Visionary Song Contest was almost secured. He confessed his ambition in his Journals in 1938: Want to write an essay on ‘The Apotheosis of Lautréamont ...”

“... Tourists seem usually to have been conducted within the endogamous British upper class, although David Hume made himself ridiculous by his unrequited passion for a Piedmontese countess and James Boswell did more than flirt with a Sienese lady foolish enough to fall for him. ‘Whore hunting amang groves o’ myrtles’ may ...”

“... a real-life King Lear in which foolish intentions would inexorably melt into blood (‘in the groves of their academy, at the end of every vista, you see nothing but the gallows’). A swelling number of French counter-revolutionaries agreed with him, hoping in vain to forge a new, conservative Franco-British entente. As the Revolution became more ...”

“... her litany stated, Mirror of Justice, Cause of Our Joy, Spiritual Vessel, Mystical Rose, Tower of David, House of Gold, Ark of the Covenant, Gate of Heaven and Morning Star. Not a woman I liked, on the whole. She was the improbability at the heart of spiritual life; a paradox, unpollinated but fruitful, above nature yet also against nature. She could have ...”

“... free’ means something like the opposite of what it meant for Gowing. The aim of the co-curators, David Blayney Brown, Amy Concannon and Smiles, is to set Turner’s last paintings free from what Brown calls the ‘reductive critical stereotypes’ that have been applied to his work by those who are determined to ignore its historicity, as if its quality and ...”

“... two American contractors had been shot and killed, when a ground-to-air missile, fired from date groves near the Euphrates, shot down a giant Chinook helicopter, killing 16 men. The helicopter pilots who try to guard convoys around Fallujah are based ten miles from the town in an old Iraqi airbase at Habbaniyah. A detachment equipped with light Kiowa Warrior ...”

“... and has given rise to great unease, even evasiveness, among liberal commentators in Israel. David Shulman’s afterword to this edition is an impressive exception. Khirbet Khizeh is an Arab village, which is captured – more or less without a fight – by a detachment of Israeli soldiers in the 1948 war. (The word khirbah in Arabic, like the Hebrew ...”

“... or Busby’s or Guardiola’s. Why would I care? The five I have read are: We All Live in a Perry Groves World (Arsenal winger, 1986-92); It’s Only Ray Parlour (Arsenal midfielder, 1992-2004); Stillness and Speed: My Story by Dennis Bergkamp (Arsenal striker, 1995-2006); Addicted by Tony Adams (Arsenal centre-back, 1983-2002); and, now, Arsène Wenger’s ...”

“... overcome with emotion. The train to Barcelona was so slow they could jump down into the orange groves, throw fruit to their comrades, and get back on board. In Barcelona they were greeted by a tumult of brass bands and sloganeering. From there they were sent to Albacete. Albacete was the base for the International Brigades, which were officially formed in ...”

“... Apsley (1616-83). The poem described by Lee as ‘rarely accessible’, now easily accessible in David Norbrook’s modern spelling edition, offers according to Norbrook ‘a particularly strong corrective to the conventional view that literature after 1660 became firmly Royalist’, for it is entirely informed by the religious and political ideals of ...”

“... forty pages on the separation of the uranium isotopes by diffusion. How easy it all was! General Groves, the American commander of the project, was notorious among the scientists for his obsession with security, but Fuchs could load a pile of secret documents, including a scale drawing of the plutonium bomb, into his car and drive out of the Los Alamos ...”