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“... of course, but the two men were firm friends for life. Another much more distinguished convert was Clark Clifford, the beautifully-spoken lawyer who had been a friend of the Kennedys and Defence Secretary to Lyndon Johnson. When Abedi first met him Clifford was looking for a cause – especially if it had a few million dollars attached to it. Adams and Frantz ...”

“... couldn’t think about Italy at the same time even if we’d wanted to. Resisting this tendency, James Holland’s previous works – on Sicily and the mainland campaign of 1944-45, among other things – have raised awareness of what happened in Italy and why. It was never an untold story, but definitely an under-told one, especially regarding 1943. As ...”

“... away, even in the wilds of Florida, where there were no alternative jobs and sources of food to go to. It was a terrible experience to be part of a new settlement in undeveloped lands. The promoters of settlement had rarely any experience of the climatic and soil conditions, they were usually under-capitalised, lacked reserve stores, and insistence on ...”

“... of Superman and Batman’s deep whiteness that establishes Spider-Man’s metaphoric blackness. Clark Kent and Bruce Wayne live in palaces of privilege and operate from fantasy cities, Metropolis and Gotham, while working-class Spider-Man is a bridge-and-tunnel person, from Queens, in the real New York. Spider-Man’s good intentions get misrepresented in ...”

“... were to marry, respectively, the politician Geoffrey Howe (now Lord Howe) and the architect James (later Sir James) Stirling’. Sometimes whole sentences seem designed merely to boast of good breeding: the good looks of the young Candida, Hillier announces, ‘rivalled those of the most stunning women ...”

“... or ‘servile’). The opening cry is almost as much a problem. How can ‘Debout!’ go into English (‘Arise!’ is dreadful)? It wasn’t until Socialist Songs in Chicago in 1900 that ‘ye wretched of the earth’ was hit on as an equivalent to ‘les damnés de la terre’ – the ‘ye’ too familiar, maybe, but ‘wretched’ a great ...”

“... One of the odder political books I have read is The Abuse of Power, by James Margach, the veteran lobby correspondent of the Sunday Times. Published in 1978, the book was subtitled with a flourish: ‘The war between Downing Street and the media from Lloyd George to Callaghan’. For 40 years and more, Margach had enjoyed the confidence of prime ministers ...”

“... criterion level’. But these are old-fashioned issues. Onwards to Raqqa and Mosul! T.J. Clark For​ ‘Yes’ voters 19 September was a very dreich day. A 6 per cent swing would have made all the difference; but it didn’t happen. Older voters tended to be the most staunchly Unionist: time may not be on the Union’s side. As yet, despite the ...”

“... the wholesale destruction of posh cars and real estate. The spectre is sorrow. From Batman to James Bond, every hero is grieving, stricken by a loss from which he can’t recover, whether of parents, mistress, wife or daughter. He – it’s always a he, the women in these movies just get to be decorous or evil, much better options – is all twisted ...”

“... Small anguished cries come to their lips unbidden. The Crosby by-election, shriek the polls, Must go to Shirley Williams by a cable. Should that occur the toiling Fleet Street trolls Will find her shapelier than Betty Grable, While making sure a solemn tocsin tolls To tell Roy Jenkins he is not Clark Gable. About the top ...”

“... in countercultural terms and Richard Slotkin’s vast Gunfighter Nation is haunted by Vietnam. Lee Clark Mitchell’s elegantly written Westerns: Making the Man in Fiction and Film includes among its introductory epigrams Henry Kissinger’s 1972 comparison of himself with the Lone Ranger but, as befits the uncertainties of America’s post-Communism role, his ...”

“... death in 1976. In his autobiography Tippett acknowledged that Britten had once proposed they go to bed together. Soden provides an unsparing account, including the forlorn detail that Britten hovered anxiously ‘in loaned pyjamas’, leaving Tippett feeling cold and withdrawn.This joyless moment – and Tippett’s response to it: he found Britten ...”

“... With his first earnings as a garden labourer, the boy walked to Aberdeen and bought six volumes of James Hervey’s Reflections on a Flower Garden – just as Clare had tramped from Helpston to Stamford, before the bookshop opened, to secure a coveted copy of James Thomson’s The Seasons. And like Clare, Sinclair paused on ...”

“... Mervyn Peake, living on ‘this desperate edge of now’, or the mercurial evanescence of a Jim Clark or a Joe Orton, counts for little in the scales of achievement when weighed against such elephantine stamina and titanic endurance. This book is, unashamedly, perhaps inevitably, a monument to the loneliness of the long-distance runner, rather than a paean ...”

“... force, and, as modern translations make clearer (the Revised Standard Version translates the King James Bible’s ‘time should be no longer’ as ‘there should be no more delay’), it is only when the seventh trumpet sounds that ‘the mystery of God’ will be finished. But Kant, encouraged perhaps by Luther’s translation, was unable to wait. In his ...”