“... a movie from 1943, So Proudly We Hail!, in which Claudette Colbert, Paulette Goddard and Veronica Lake played nurses on Corregidor. That blithe make-believe inspired Furey in the late 1960s to enlist as a nurse. She was trained and idealistic and brave, which meant learning to ‘swallow your own fear’ when artillery fire came down on her field ...”

“... the Nuremberg race laws were enacted, when she saw her sitting forlornly on her own beside a lake near Berlin: ‘I thought, God she’s sitting there so alone. She can play with us and we can swim together.’ Dubnack says she didn’t really think of the dangers when Naumann moved in – ‘We were young. And we were opposed’ – successfully hiding ...”

“... key is psych war within Chile. We cannot endeavour to ignite the world if Chile itself is a placid lake. The fuel for the fire must come from within Chile.’ ‘Our hand doesn’t show on this one,’ Nixon said to Kissinger shortly after the coup. But over the years, leaked and declassified US documents, as well as many books, among them ...”

“... he told me, I just believed him, because he believed in himself to the fullest,’ Zelma told Peter Guralnick. In the summer of 1962, a month before his 21st birthday, Redding got his big break. On 14 August or thereabouts (accounts vary), he drove Jenkins to Memphis to record at Stax and persuaded the studio’s founder, Jim Stewart, to let him sing a ...”

“... for the fact that an eyewitness sighting of the Unabomber outside a computer shop in Salt Lake City put him in his late twenties. In reality Kaczynski was a skinny 45; a mistake which meant that even when the cops were looking in the right place (the University of Michigan and UC Berkeley class lists, yearbooks from suburban high schools in the ...”

“... with its resolutely unsensuous handling of paint and crisply distinguished bands of light on the lake, can be found in British as well as German painting. Hanging opposite the art which enjoyed both official and popular success under the Third Reich are specimens of art which was banned, most conspicuously a series of watercolours by Emil Nolde – who ...”

“... Knussen recognised the affinity, and coupled poems by Trakl and Plath in his Second Symphony, and Peter Maxwell Davies has also set Trakl to music. This new collection is the most substantial so far published in England, and should finally win Trakl wider recognition. Alexander Stillmark’s selection of around 125 poems, including most of the major ones, is ...”

“... present come together and overlap. The first time he lives through this period, he sees, across a lake, someone he vaguely recognises: perhaps his father? No, his father is dead, but that person sends a silver stag which saves him from present danger. When he goes back in time, he runs to the same place to see who it was, and there’s no one else there: he ...”

“... minister), the French newspaper editor Alexandre Dujarier, Marius Petipa (the creator of Swan Lake and The Nutcracker), the Earl of Malmesbury, the Count of Schleissen, Lord Brougham (once described as ‘the ugliest man of the present century next to Liston and Lord Carlyle’), Jung Bahadur (the Nepalese ambassador to London), Savile Morton (a ...”

“... useful objects respected like artworks. Blades, chisels, axes, boots, helmets, guns. The actor Peter Coyote remembers Joanne Kyger laughing about ‘how much stuff Gary had to store so that he could go off to Japan and live simply’. The novice monk insisted that his future wife clear her credit-card debt, which had climbed to $1000, before she travelled ...”

“... of France’s fortifications along its eastern border with Germany. Donald and his brother, Peter, are not yet proficient enough in English to understand the text, so Joe translates it into German:The essential points of the French system, which was carried out on a gigantic scale, are as follows: a line of fortified casemates giving each other mutual ...”

“... and how, and when. When Heaney talks, as he must, about ‘Digging’ (it has become his ‘Lake Isle of Innisfree’), he describes ‘a kind of sonic chain dictated by the inner ear’, ‘the connection between the “uh” sounds in “thumb” and “snug” and “gun”’. ‘Punishment’, one of Heaney’s celebrated poems from the ...”

“... the perspective of an adult, and to assume that Gorey did too. Yet, as his occasional collaborator Peter Neumeyer remarked: ‘Of all the people I’ve known nobody has been less interested in children.’ He had no memory of Gorey ever even using the word ‘child’.What Gorey understood was not children, but the perspective of childhood and its lack of ...”

“... Keith Thomas puts it, ‘changing gestural codes offer a key to changing social relationships.’ Peter Burke points out that the two historians who have done most to encourage this view are Norbert Elias and Michel Foucault. In The Civilising Process, first published in 1939, Elias argued that a rising European bourgeoisie sought to discipline itself by a ...”

“... thing hide a dazzle of wonder, is a recurrent feature of the tales (several of which have St Peter or the Virgin Mary roaming the earth), and is why they give the impression of being rooted in the experience of people who work with their hands or who need to imagine their way into a less gritty and less subsistence-based existence. Cinderella is a ...”