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“... military administration of India. He was lucky that his reputation survived South Africa. The one major engagement he fought there, at Paardeburg, he tried to win by the same methods that had worked at Omdurman. Overriding the advice of the more experienced general on the spot that the besieged Boers could more economically be starved into ...”

“... to which it had grown accustomed. For years now the BBC has been unable to fund by itself the major drama and documentary series. Producers must wait on tenterhooks for money to be raised from foreign broadcasters before they can see their ideas turned into reality. So it has no longer been possible to sustain the organisation and all its activities ...”

“... On the contrary, the advancement of science and its associated technologies is seen by many as the major threat to both freedom of speech and freedom from fear – if not to freedom of worship. In any case, somebody has to decide what problems ought to be tackled. That somebody has to have a very long purse. Science is much too expensive to be undertaken out ...”

“... leader by traditional, and legitimately predatory, commercial practices over many decades. Its major expansion came with the ‘chaining’ of US bookshops in the Eighties. The UK usually lags behind America in retail bookselling so this process is only now underway in Britain, with Waterstone’s assault on W.H. Smith. In historical terms, a late ...”

“... In May 1983 he was promoted to assistant to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General John Vessey, and over the next couple of years he oversaw a secret team – operating in part out of the office of Daniel Murphy, Bush’s chief of staff – which quietly conducted at least 35 covert operations against drug trafficking, terrorism and, most ...”

“... has a long tradition in Britain. Thomas Grant, in his book about the Old Bailey, Court Number One (John Murray, £10.99), gives special credit to Rebecca West, who wrote about treason and spy cases from the 1940s to the 1960s, and Sybille Bedford, whose account of the trial of Dr Bodkin Adams in 1957 is ‘generally regarded as the finest single volume account ...”

“... the massive resistance of capital, labour, finance and public opinion. Unlike the Webbs, Mosley or John Strachey (in the authoritarian phase of his Coming Struggle for Power), PEP’s most outspoken planners still held to a belief in planning within an open democratic society. Yet they achieved this worthy position by evading the question of power. Power was ...”

“... country, I replied with a journalist’s discretion. But what did he think of the Afghans? The major stared gloomily out of the truck window at the Soviet armoured vehicle escorting us, its crew vainly trying to control the metal tracks as they skidded on the ice. His wife and daughter were in Tashkent and he had already vouchsafed his desire to return to ...”

“... It comes as a surprise to learn that the second artist given a major show at the Museum of Modern Art was Diego Rivera, for when the exhibition opened in December 1931, the 45-year-old Mexican was already a celebrated Communist. Just as surprising, given that the museum was founded by Abby Aldrich Rockefeller and friends, is what Rivera chose to display: five fresco panels devoted to Mexican history from the perspective of the recent revolution, and three others concerning New York City during the Depression ...”

“... John Turturro​ ’s Fading Gigolo is a delicate movie about indelicate matters. No, wait, perhaps it’s an indelicate movie about delicate matters. The uncertainty does the film no harm but it seems to have prompted critics to simplify their doubts and decide they have seen it all before. It’s true the film owes a lot to Woody Allen, and not just because he has a major acting part in it ...”

“... These books are both attempts, by oblique routes, to explain major events in English history: in one case the Civil War, and in the other the Reformation. That, however, is where the resemblance between them ends: for the rest, it would be hard to find a more extreme contrast in historical methods. Professor Underdown, as he makes clear in his preface, sees no virtue in attempts at explanation of the Civil War which concentrate on political events at the centre ...”

“... who win Mastermind. Now his own long-heralded account of his experiences has been published. John Stalker had been Deputy Chief Constable of Greater Manchester Police for only two months when he was asked to conduct an investigation into matters arising out of three incidents in Northern Ireland, where Royal Ulster Constabulary officers had shot and ...”

“... his attention at the point where they have failed in some way, have proved ‘minor’, not ‘major’. The first three, for instance, are Philip Henry Gosse (the Father of Father and Son), who had his work for ever upstaged by The Origin of Species; John Churton Collins, a good journalist and scholar for ever cruelly ...”

“... There is,’ John Lord Campbell observed in his multi-volume, Mid-Victorian Lives of the Lord Chancellors, ‘no office in the history of any nation that has been filled with such a long succession of distinguished and interesting men as the office of Lord Chancellor.’ A roll-call which included such illustrious history-makers as Wolsey, More, Bacon and Clarendon lent some credence to Campbell’s hyperbole ...”

“... of passers-by, welcoming travellers to Orange County. He used to straddle the entrance to the John Wayne International Airport; now, so as not to suffer the weatherbeaten fate of the original, the cowboy statue has sought protection from the elements and taken shelter indoors. Florence has David, also transferred from open to inner space; Orange County ...”