“... the sweeter for involving the frustration of an English competitor, the grouchy polymath Thomas Young – to whom much of the credit goes, on the other hand, for having cracked the cursive script. Young had the advantage of being able to go along to Bloomsbury should he feel the need to take another look at the ...”

“... comes all the harder for being couched in compassion:I see . . . a confusion – how natural to a young man so isolated – creeping in upon him. Perhaps the aesthetes were right? Perhaps he could retain his good painting and yet satisfy the English thirst for sentimentality? Suppose we get the loveliest woman procurable, and put her in the finest robe ...”

“... ideology’ existing in some significant relation to the social and political mood of the time. Robert Conquest’s anthology came out in 1956, the year of Suez, so the ‘ideology’ must have been formed during the administrations of Churchill and Eden. The first Attlee Government carried out the programme enthusiastically endorsed by the troops in ...”

“... but her farcical mother, having arranged the match, prevents its consummation, and the hero, the young writer, sleeps with her on the wedding night. Then they go off to Europe, leaving the husband behind. The love-relationship is serious and silly, passionate and tedious. The writer remembers from Chekhov’s notebook the saying that love is ‘either a ...”

“... race, rallying to Britannia in her hour of need. What kind of men were they? Predominantly single, young, eager, and without technical skills. Most were channelled into the Infantry, where they could be taught the rudiments of trench warfare in a few weeks. A few of them, however, already possessed the most crucial skill of such a war: the ability to ...”

“... the inevitable Henry Kissinger, Mr Moon, Vice-President Bush and the President of the World Bank, Robert McNamara. More serious was the realisation that the antique-dealer, Deverini, who was accused of having helped Gelli to enter Monaco illegally, had earlier been accused of murder. It was remembered, too, that a Colonel Salvatore Florio, who had once ...”

“... as she was by the subsequent break-up of her wartime affair with the radio writer Gordon Glover. Robert Liddell, in his contribution to Dale Salwak’s volume, objects to too tragic a view of ‘Barbara’s hobby (generally enjoyable) of “unrequited love” ’, and as a friend of hers since 1932 his view has to be taken seriously. Nevertheless, Barbara ...”

“... thinking that the party is less religious than its Christian Democrat counterparts’. Ken Young uses his unrivalled knowledge of municipal politics, especially in London, to expose some of the imperatives which have driven policy in this important field of democratic self-government. He shows how, before the Second World War, it was the Conservatives ...”

“... remained one of Evelyn’s friends for most of his life. He also enjoyed what was called, after Robert Boyle had popularised the term, ‘seraphick love’ with Anne Russell (whom he dubbed ‘Platona’) and Elizabeth Carey (who became his ‘Electra’). It is exceptionally hard to describe what Evelyn felt for these women: probably it is best to say that ...”

“... don’t speak any foreign languages, I don’t like foreigners,’ to which Churchill replied: ‘Young man, these all seem to me to be positive advantages.’ When Eden was dealing with the Indo-China crisis in Geneva, holding the French by one hand while holding off the hawkish Dulles with the other (‘The trouble with you, Foster,’ Eden told him, ‘is ...”

“... from the start, you were forced to admire Newton’s modesty, and his genius. The reviewer, the young astronomer Edmond Halley, knew what he was talking about. Three years earlier, during a visit to Cambridge, he had posed the puzzle which started Newton on the path to his Principia. What is the orbit of a planet under the influence of an attractive force ...”

“... in the Megastore who ‘samples’ his signs of identity from its offerings, but as a young journalist-critic who needs to report on it. In 1985 Si Newhouse, the mogul of the Condé Nast media empire (Vogue, GQ, Vanity Fair), purchased the New Yorker from its founding family – to scatter some of its aura on his other publications, or so it was ...”

“... Exactly who she was, and whether she existed at all, no one is sure (two possible candidates are a young spy called Anne Marie Lesser, and Elsbeth Schragmuller, a former student at the University of Freiburg). In effect, the Lady Doctor was a blank page on which were inscribed all types of kinkiness. ‘The Frau Doktor, as she was addressed by her ...”

“... began life as anarchists. A group portrait from January 1924 arranges photographs of the young André Breton, Louis Aragon, Paul Éluard, Max Ernst and others in a grid around a mugshot of an even more youthful Germaine Berton, an anarchist who assassinated Marius Plateau, editor of the ultra-nationalist Action française. With titles like ‘Open ...”

“... have been better reflected in another abstract perfume, Chanel No. 19, invented for her by Henri Robert in December 1970, the month before she died. It was named for her birthday, 19 August. Tania Sanchez describes it as ‘a striking and admirably dissonant portrait’ of the 87-year-old Chanel, ‘from the silvery hiss of its nail-polish-remover beginnings ...”