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“... he hadn’t counted on how little one congressman (out of 435) could do. The speaker of the House, John Boehner, set the agenda, and Meadows was expected to do what he was told. ‘Boehner had “enforcers”, not unlike a Mafia don. If you didn’t vote how he wanted, these enforcers – most notably his leadership team – would ban you from congressional ...”

“... was only carried by a handful of votes. In view of the virtually unanimous support for the Owen-Steel initiative at the SDP’s Harrogate Conference, the apparent split between the two parties hides an almost 3-to-l majority for their European initiative and against a non-nuclear policy. Arguments about defence in 1986 have not been the sole property of the ...”

“... as a setting for sculpture are the consequences of a single-minded pursuit by its main architect, John Russell Pope, of its underlying purpose, which was to provide a famous dealer in need of respectability, Lord Duveen, with a chance to display his munificence on a colossal scale. So the space seems designed to diminish any person or thing that enters ...”

“... he be required to remove his trousers. Lowe, it turns out, was a sergeant-major in the war, and John Le Mesurier, who played the limp Sergeant Wilson, was a captain. Now Lowe was playing a bank manager who had come up the hard way, and Le Mesurier, his chief clerk, was a pampered ex-public schoolboy, incapable of giving orders (‘Oh, Wilson! Bark it ...”

“... platform. The Chinese NCOs wiped their boots as the blood ran into the metal grooves of the steel rails. A tram crowded with passengers approached, its bell forcing the execution party aside. It clanked along, connector rod hissing and throwing sparks from the overhead power line, its front wheels a moist scarlet as if painted for the annual labour ...”

“... that the scientific hero embarks upon whatever research enterprise he believes to be worthy of his steel, regardless of the risks of defeat. These are some of the faces that Albert Einstein presents to us now. But for his contemporaries he must also have played a more immediate role – the fellow-citizen of the republic of learning. Consider the third of ...”

“... Soviet troops crossed the boundaries of pre-1939 Germany, and the atrocities they committed helped steel the resolve of the defenders. When the Germans retook the East Prussian village of Nemmersdorf they found dozens of bodies of women and children who had been murdered in the most gruesome ways. In the months that followed, Soviet forces killed or violated ...”

“... long periods of insomnia when I sat up all night, gazing out at the industrial night above our steel-town estate; an incident when, during a stay in a hotel in Portsmouth, I ‘woke’ to find myself in the bathroom, blood running down my cheek. What was happening? Was my sleep condition a lifelong malaise that had taken different forms over the years, and ...”

“... only half the story. The other half concerns the Liberal Party and in particular the role of David Steel. It may not be true that Jenkins was dissuaded from joining the Liberal Party by Steel, but plainly the two men were working together from the Brussels days onward to create a new opening on the centre-left. The Alliance ...”

“... back, cow-eyed and alabaster-browed. The actual text is 1079 tiny-printed pages long. ‘Who is John Galt?’ the novel begins: the question is rhetorical, an expression of despair. The setting is, loosely, America in the 1940s – Washington, Wisconsin, Mexico are mentioned, as are diners, bums, hamburgers, negligees – but film-set-thin and vague and ...”

“... before telling me I was the latest visitor in a tradition of literary visitors stretching back to John Milton. He said it very kindly, but I wanted to laugh. However, something high in his red cheeks warned me neither to laugh nor to make any reference to Paradise Lost. I simply smiled and composed my wits and followed him over the black and claret tiles to ...”

“... been international waters. Icelandic gunboats towing net cutters would slice through the steel cables British trawlers used to drag their nets behind them, while Royal Navy frigates tried to keep the gunboats away. Hardie was fishing with a group of twenty trawlers one afternoon, dragging his nets at the standard three and a half knots, when a ...”

“... of the term, slotting it between ‘guilty quotation marks’ throughout the issue. Designed by John Piper (with whom Myfanwy was living at Fawley Bottom, a rundown farmhouse in Oxfordshire), Axis was crisp and modern, with sans-serif lettering and experimental prose. But Myfanwy’s refusal to pin down abstraction infuriated the artists. In what Maclean ...”

“... with a suicide. Into these wavering constructions, Carter inserts explicit statements, like the steel rods in skyscrapers. It was a habit she fell in and out of, depending on the weight of programme in each book. Her last two novels, Nights at the Circus (1984) and Wise Children (1991), are relatively free-standing. But in Shadow Dance, it is surely a ...”

“... The dust jacket of the final volume of Bevis Hillier’s epic life of John Betjeman shows the poet laureate seized by giggles. In this lengthy coda to Hillier’s authorised biography Betjeman appears in many lights, but he’s rarely carefree. ‘Nothing frightens me more than the thought of dying,’ he told a friend in 1958 ...”