“... his way immediately to Iseult’s house. She was later arrested for harbouring him briefly and held for a month before being found not guilty. By the time Fisk’s book came out I was no longer seeing much of Francis and Madeleine. In 1982, we had printed a letter about Stuart’s column which accused him of having been a Nazi supporter. On the morning In ...”

“... palace coup in Oman in 1970 and – last but not least – three abortive plots, farmed out to David Stirling and sundry other mercenaries under the initially benevolent eye of Western intelligence services, to overthrow the Gaddafi regime between 1971 and 1973 in an episode known as the Hilton Assignment. At the same time, the story of Libya in 2011 gives ...”

“... by something squalid that squats ‘lookin’ up at ’im, you see’. But he dies a vertical man, held upright by some obscure passionate intensity, almost a principle. The only function of the other figure is to look up to this dreadful but memorable intensity. To identify him (let alone her, let alone to make the body that of Mrs Bathurst) will only ...”

“... administrative system during the Second World War. In the spring of 1945, a conference was held in San Francisco to set up the United Nations. It hadn’t originally been scheduled to discuss a separate body for health, but a Chinese medic and diplomat’s son called Szeming Sze managed to push it onto the agenda, where it was overwhelmingly ...”

“... in the 1960s a fighter in the underground against the military dictatorship, who had never held or run for electoral office before. With Lula at her side, she coasted to victory with a 56 per cent majority, the first woman to win the presidency. Initially better received by a middle class that detested Lula, for two years she enjoyed quite widespread ...”

“... out a substantial and authoritative History of Irish Women’s Poetry, edited by Ailbhe Darcy and David Wheatley. A new genealogy of Irish poetry that doesn’t foreground Yeats or Kavanagh but Katharine Tynan and Máire Mhac an tSaoi has come into view.Deane reacted promptly to protests about The Field Day Anthology by commissioning two volumes of women’s ...”

“... families. This budget helps hardworking people keep more of the money they have earned. His boss, David Cameron, criticising Labour in Parliament last month: They met with a bunch of migrants in Calais, they said they could all come to Britain. The only people they never stand up for are the British people and hardworking taxpayers. The former Conservative ...”

“... in – ‘a random bundle of information,’ as Rusbridger puts it of the pre-digital Guardian, ‘held together by the glue of appearing in the same printed package’. When Rupert Murdoch tried to paywall the Sun, the readers wouldn’t cough up. But​ what if you didn’t put up a paywall? What you lost in revenue, you would, in theory, gain as a ...”

“... and Austro-Hungarian did not, that was because Bolshevik internationalism, which was genuine, held it together. Under Stalin, however the logic of an imperial space controlled from Moscow took over, and an earlier Ukrainian nationalism, never general but equally never extinguished, came to acquire a new intensity, becoming more anti-Russian than, say ...”

“... do I think ...’ Much of what critics like Louis Menand (in the New York Review of Books) and David Denby (in the New Yorker) have said about Eyes Wide Shut is true. The timing is terrible, the dialogue is wooden and Tom Cruise is worse than you can imagine any reasonably competent actor could be. He has only one gesture – a sketch of a wave of the ...”

“... priest and doctor. Dr Rabelais, like Father Rabelais, comforts the afflicted. A Platonising bishop held that the surname Rabelais, by mystical Hebrew etymology, truly means ‘Prince of Mockers’. In 1818 Hazlitt ended his introductory lecture ‘On the English Comic Writers’ not with Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Congreve, Sterne or Garrick but with ...”

“... failed to respond to this compliment with any valuable acknowledgment, Thomson, Aaron Hill and David Mallet prepared satirical verses on unsatisfactory patrons to preface the second edition of ‘Winter’. Compton stepped in in time (with civility and 20 guineas), and Thomson judiciously persuaded his friends to tone down their verses, or at least to ...”

“... a journalistic sinecure in the most reactionary Prussian government of the century (a position he held for the next twenty years). Tallhover’s surveillance of Theodor Fontane is not recorded in Schädlich’s novel; and in any case, Grass’s Hoftaller is a far jollier figure, who intervenes fully as much to protect the sometimes naive Fonty as he does to ...”

“... old man had once been La Zambinella, and that the fortune of the household in which the party was held came from La Zambinella’s earnings as a castrato much in demand. Martha Feldman’s The Castrato, rich in scholarship and filled with subtle analysis, is one of several books that have appeared on the subject of castrati in recent years. In The Queen’s ...”

“... publication, he was nominated for election as an associate of the Linnean Society. According to David Attenborough, Lear is ‘the finest bird artist there ever was’. His drawings were primarily intended to help scientists identify species, yet his birds are exhibitionists as well as exhibits, always more than an instance that confirms a rule. The same ...”