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“... or the capacity of the nation to fight a war. The book had an extraordinary impact. Alan Clark records approvingly that Mrs Thatcher herself read it, and many of her ministers made public reference to it – which is surprising since Barnett is not a Thatcherite historian, but an economic nationalist. He believes that Britain’s problem was that the ...”

“... taken to Kew. (Grigson doesn’t mention it, but Ray’s son by the earl, Basil Montagu, would go on to be a founder member of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, which became ‘Royal’ in 1840.) Ray’s ‘violent longing’ gets at the tension at the heart of Menagerie: there’s cruelty as well as affection on every page. Neglect and ...”

“... Bolton Abbey, Burnsall, Kettlewell, Buckden, nowhere now too desolate or far-flung. So we go on down to Hubberholme to look at the rood loft, one of only two remaining in Yorkshire (the other at Flamborough). And it is a loft proper, not just a screen with a top on it, three feet or so wide and with a slatted floor as if it might be a loft for ...”

“... people you are stripping of their assets. In this sense, looting is like rape, and the two often go together, as the title of Lynn Nicholas’s book indicates. Atrocious behaviour can itself be the revenge of the humiliated, which is why of all wars ethnic and communal conflicts are the cruellest. The hatred of the rural Serb for the citizens of Sarajevo is ...”

“... early life, so that we see, not only Grieve the friend of Red Clydesiders John MacLean and James Maxton, but also the Grieve whose Scottish nationalism was encouraged by his rejection by English girls. Heady on his home-brew of Nietzsche, John Davidson, and almost any other literary material he could devour, this proto-MacDiarmid emerges as something ...”

“... of its power. Hence monarchy’s enduring popularity. In his quirky late essay The English (1992), G.R. Elton asserted that England’s remarkable independence ‘sprang surprisingly enough from the strength and weight of the monarchy. Kings of England commanded a range of power and control over all subjects which outdistanced supposedly greater monarchs on ...”

“... further behind the someone I was. It isn’t the information that Carole Lombard was married to Clark Gable that has gone, it’s the me who knew it who is disappearing. Those who are older than they are young make exaggeratedly impatient, self-deprecating jokes when they forget a name, a face or why it was they walked into a room. (Recent research from ...”

“... younger group of postmodern artists who substituted photographic imagery for painting, among them James Coleman, Louise Lawler and Cindy Sherman. ‘Door to the River’ (1960) In Art since 1900, the massive textbook she and her October colleagues published in 2005, de Kooning seems to be one of a passel of painters in whose hands ‘the entire ...”

“... countrymen of a different race, a different persuasion, I should renounce Germany at once and go to America.’ But Enver, distant and smooth, is not impressed. ‘There can be no peace,’ he tells Lepsius, ‘between human beings and plague germs.’ It would be six years before Hitler would ask his cronies: ‘After all, who talks today about the ...”

“... them. He joined the Communist Party at 15, the army at 19, and at 21 he got himself to UCLA on the GI Bill, where he studied English and edited the Daily Bruin (Watergate conspirators Bob Haldeman and John Ehrlichman were his arch-enemies on the paper). By then, he’d already been part of the Allied occupation of Germany pulling bodies out of the rubble, gone ...”

“... Enthralled by the ‘fashionable androgyny’ of ‘consumer culture’, these critics will go to any lengths to discredit Lawrence’s advocacy of sexual polarity. Balbert catches them quoting out of context: Paul Morel’s patronising view of the suffrage movement is not Lawrence’s, but part of a dialogue with Clara Dawes which will eventually ...”

“... affected Housman. The strongest influence, not only because the echoes are so frequent – G.B.A. Fletcher’s long list in Richards’s book could be expanded – is surely Heine: compared to his, the influence of Shakespeare and the Ballads is remote. But instead of critical discussion of such questions, Mr Graves offers only lengthy and repetitive ...”

“... life and art for Yale’s ‘Jewish Lives’ series, drawing freely on the literary critic James Breslin’s impressive full-length biography of 1993. Unlike Breslin, she has little curiosity about Rothko’s darker side, preferring to see his life as an ongoing quest, as she puts it in her subtitle, ‘towards the light in the chapel’. She has ...”

“... sure that much of Layard’s admiration for Piero, like that expressed a few years before by James Dennistoun in his Memoirs of the Dukes of Urbino, had been inspired by Eastlake. But Layard was particularly attracted by the fact that Piero was chiefly a mural painter. Unlike Eastlake, Layard was not at this point a collector of paintings, and his visits ...”

“... say’ about Irish Americans ‘is both true and false’, the historian of Irish America Dennis Clark has warned. This isn’t helped by the fact that it has been notoriously difficult to follow the progress of Irish immigrants after their arrival in the United States. The census fails again here. People were not asked where they were born until 1850; only ...”