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“... of Burns. In this respect and others, Burns is like a peasant poet of modern times, the Irishman Patrick Kavanagh, who spent many hard and lonely years as a farmer, and of whom Seamus Heaney, another Irish poet with close ties to the world of the countryside, has written: ‘he wrested his idiom bare-handed out of a literary nowhere.’ ‘I am ...”

“... projects by Colquhoun and Miller, one in Camden and another in Hackney, where an icy, high-style white-walled modernism, derived from the work of Adolf Loos and Giuseppe Terragni, somehow morphs into the typology of the London Victorian semi, for a clientele of Camden and Hackney council tenants. Today, NW1’s role has largely been supplanted by E1, and the ...”

“... that the Italian historians who did not go into exile were all good anti-Fascists at heart. Patrick Salmon rescues the Nuremberg judges and dents the tu quoque Nazi apologists by showing that although the British were intending to invade Norway and had already violated its neutrality at the time when the German invasion got under way, the German ...”

“... A coincidence: I wrote the first page of ‘It’ on St Patrick’s Day with Irish pipers tuning up down in the street 12 floors beneath. In the parade along 5th Avenue they carried banner portraits of Sean McDermott, Kevin Barry and, no doubt, other martyrs. I didn’t stay long because the wind was bitter, the pavement covered in slush and my bones frozen to the marrow ...”

“... house arrest. So I am sure to find him at home. The soldiers at the gate are taken by surprise: a white man, tailed by security agents in a car – probably from the Directorate of Military Intelligence – nervously fingering their cell phones. ‘M. Bizimungu doesn’t want to see anybody!’ But I’d already rung the bell. Pasteur Bizimungu shoots out and ...”

“... He knew how to impress them. In February 1962, when Jackie Kennedy made her television tour of the White House, Capote wrote to the Deweys: Yes, I knew Jackie was doing the TV tour, and am delighted to hear it was such a success: it was very thoughtful of you to write to her, Marie. She knows all about the Dewey family – we’ve discussed you at length. She ...”

“... a remarkably handsome newspaper, much more spacious in its page layouts and crisper in its black/white contrasts than its rival, the Sunday Times, which looked untidy and grey by comparison. Throughout the 1950s it was the dominant ‘quality’ Sunday paper, certainly in its cultural and political influence among the young if not always in terms of its ...”

“... Luttwak, Michael Ledeen, Jeane Kirkpatrick, media legitimisers from George Will, William Safire, Patrick Buchanan and William Buckley to reporters like Shirley Christian and James Le Moyne, the editorial staff of the New Republic and Commentary, and many more) has moved American policy into a ruthless and uncomprehending adversarialism towards terrorism and ...”

“... Melville created an austere, sombre aesthetic: even his colour films appear to be in black and white. His protagonists, whether resistants, gangsters or priests, are solitary ‘men without women’, in the words of Volker Schlöndorff, who worked as his assistant in the early 1960s. Driven by duty, they move inexorably towards their fate, which is often ...”

“... twang. He was so stoned he just smiled, picked up the magazine and walked back inside. Captain Patrick Hennessey suggested dropping a bomb, which everyone said was far too reckless as the Taliban were so close. He insisted he’d done it before and it worked. Before long we could hear an F-16 and Major David said: ‘Thirty seconds until impact.’ The ...”

“... supper. It turned out supper was something that happened in the glen before 6.30 p.m. A lady in a white lab coat emerged to remind us of the fact. The phrase ‘You’ll have hud yer tea, then?’ is not unknown in Scotland’s eastern quarter. I didn’t hear it much as a child, being from the other coast, but I knew of it and have always thought it a ...”

“... in a prose that looked decidedly non-experimental – pure, classical, like something carved from white marble.’ Even so, a host of critics (mostly male) simply missed the point. Among other things, the decidedly odd and unsexy ‘Miss Cather’ was deemed to be insufficiently engaged with Big Social Issues. During the Depression she came under violent ...”

“... time privileged zones – the terrains of St John Philby and Robert Byron, of Norman Douglas and Patrick Leigh-Fermor, of R.W.Seton-Watson and Rebecca West. Sorties farther afield – like Peter Fleming’s expeditions to the Gobi or Matto Grosso – were fewer. Paradoxically, the vast expanse of the Empire itself was not fertile soil for this kind of ...”

“... by the Russian representative in New York in June 1920. But according to the Sinn Féin envoy Patrick McCartan – writing to a Soviet official from neighbouring Estonia on his way back to Ireland from Russia in June 1921 – this had not been seriously considered by de Valera because of McCartan’s doubts about when ‘your representatives speak for ...”

“... million, with another £100 million in cuts planned for the next three years. ‘People went white … at the prospect of it,’ Nick Forbes,its leader, told the Guardian in 2011. ‘There was a sense of disbelief about what it all meant, and the scale of cuts we would have to make.’ ‘I think that once the first or second wave of councils has gone ...”