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“... the bust of Guzmán’s father removed from the public garden where it stood and replaced with a small bronze head of Grace Kelly, presumably all that was available at the time. Guzmán and his colleagues decided in their course of the investigation to reverse the Nuremberg principle in relation to middle and low-ranking offenders and to accept superior ...”

“... stops short at the prospect of the victim of a forced marriage living a loveless life on a small country property: Marthe, a recently published historical memoir, gives us the enthralling correspondence deriving from a similar case among provincial notables less than a century ago. It is difficult not to feel, when reading Mme de Beauvoir’s ...”

“... dump in which (it is implied) mere heterosexuals are content to fret and rot from crib to coffin. Stephen Adams does not propose a general or ‘encompassing’ thesis. Having insisted that methods and messages are diverse and individual, he settles down to record them, beginning with Gore Vidal and ending with Jean Genet. His manner is to give detailed and ...”

“... The small dacha in Peredelkino outside Moscow where Boris Pasternak lived for several years and where in 1960 he died is now a museum. It was there that the Writer’s Union representative took us – a group of jet-lagged American journal editors – on the first afternoon of our recent visit. The books and the furniture and the grand piano and the drawings by his father Leonid, all of which had been carted off after Pasternak’s death, when the dacha was unceremoniously assigned to another writer, have been brought back, and the poet who had been expelled by the Writer’s Union in the wake of the publication of Doctor Zhivago, is now given culture’s highest tribute – museumification ...”

“... solid Great-War-period romantic novel. The ethos is that of If winter comes, or The Forsyte Saga. Stephen, the hero/heroine, driven out of her grand ancestral home, joins an ambulance unit, is wounded and gets the Croix de Guerre, and won’t declare her compromising love until she is sure it’s returned. When Mary succumbs she supports her by writing, but ...”

“... Bobby Sands’, the former MP, who died, aged 27, after fasting for 66 days. In the surprisingly small, fenced enclosure reserved for the IRA’s dead, there were already three names on the plaque that Thomas ‘Bootsie’ Begley, aged 23, would be sharing. It lay to one side of his grave, which was marked by a mound of earth draped with a length of nylon ...”

“... the founders of Alpha 66, 76-year-old Andres Nasario Sargen, had driven me out to the camp in his small Ford. We had set out from Alpha 66’s office in the heart of Cuban Miami accompanied by two of Nasario’s fellow volunteers, including a man named Enrique Acosta who, ironically, sported a Che Guevara beard and beret. Nasario told me that he had been a ...”

“... of callings. Wright’s Franklin emerges as the instigator of a dozen projects both great and small, from street lighting in Philadelphia to the treaty of alliance with France that helped the American colonies win independence from Britain. Wright’s Franklin is like Wright’s narrative: tolerant of contradictions and complexity, yet willing to simplify ...”

“... the bank where Barre looted his golden handshake. The gate to the courtyard is still secured by a small green padlock, fastened by the dutiful manager. The leading USC technical pulls over by a traffic light with its eyes out on stalks, but our vehicle drives through the checkpoint, going north, crunching over cartridges fallen as thickly as leaves. We are by ...”

“... saved a local hospital in Hillingdon from closure; the National Federation of Self-Employed and Small Businesses seeking to enforce the taxation of casual print-workers; and a considerable number of private individuals concerned with the legality of official action or inaction. The power of the courts to intervene where an arguable misuse of power affects ...”

“... on mortality and immortality. And then there’s the respectable nerdiness of it all. Leslie Stephen, founding editor in the 1880s of the original DNB, hoped that it would turn out to be one of the ‘most amusing’ of books. This remark may have to be interpreted in the light of the fact that Stephen’s own ...”

“... A father​ is a necessary evil,’ Stephen Dedalus says in Ulysses. In Yeats: The Man and the Masks, Richard Ellmann quoted Ivan Karamazov: ‘Who doesn’t desire his father’s death?’ ‘From the Urals to Donegal,’ Ellmann writes,the theme recurs, in Turgenev, in Samuel Butler, in Gosse. It is especially prominent in Ireland ...”

“... history with that of their working-class contemporaries in the elementary schools of the day. Stephen Humphries’s story, on the other hand, theoretically covers both sexes, though boys and youths loom larger than their feminine counterparts, and his horizon does not extend beyond the working classes. Both stories are exceedingly well documented, but ...”

“... to Brian Friel, Heaney to Riverdance – is modern Ireland’s most remarkable export. There is a small but impressive film industry known as Paddywood. Artists in Ireland are exempt from income tax on their work, and this respect for the arts goes a long way back: medieval Irish bards were in some ways more powerful than chieftains, and could wither your ...”

“... London​ in the time of Henry VIII had many colourful, even flamboyant, inhabitants. Stephen Vaughan was not one of them. His was a small life, full of frustrations; his chief characteristic was a pragmatic diligence, which gave him a good, if not brilliant, head for business. He was a merchant, a financier, a minor diplomat and an occasional low-grade spy ...”