“... only friends in Nashville were white men. She took a trip to Muscle Shoals, Alabama with Edward Donahue in his mother’s ‘majestic old Lincoln. Nella brought some sandwiches. I brought a quart of liquor and the set-ups for high-balls. At Columbia, Tennessee I had to “pass” at a Negro restaurant.’ On another occasion, the police started ...”

“... The musicians​ of my generation, and I myself, owe the most to Debussy,’ Stravinsky said, but he would also say that, much as he admired Jeux, he found some of the music in it ‘trop Lalique’, a remark of a certain cattiness, calculated to put Debussy’s protean and elusive masterpiece back in its box, at a moment (it was 1959) when, perhaps not altogether desirably for the composer of Le Sacre du printemps, Jeux was belatedly becoming the poster piece of the avant-garde, the work everyone at Darmstadt would be talking about ...”

“... story about European unification. But the process that resulted in Greek independence could be said to have begun half a century earlier, with Catherine the Great’s defeat of the Ottoman Empire in 1774. This Russian victory had two long-gestating consequences for the Greeks. First, the northern rim of the Black Sea and its farming steppe were opened up ...”

“... as shocking new weapons. General Mark Milley, current chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has said Chinese tests of these technologies constitute a ‘Sputnik moment’. They are more likely to be a sign that China is trying to keep up with American advances in ballistic missile defence. The imperative is to ensure that its nuclear forces can survive a ...”

“... disliked his parents may have been that his life veered too close to his mother’s fiction. Among Edward Godfree Aldington’s early gestures of rebellion was his rejection of the name his parents had given him: from his teens he called himself Richard. A sparkling-eyed poet who played rugby at school, he caught the eye of many women. In his youth he had a ...”

“... a couple of lay peers to make up the numbers) had become so notorious that the solicitor-general said publicly that their conduct ‘would disgrace the lowest court of justice in the kingdom’. It was to meet this reproach that the idea of the life peerage was devised – an injection of red blood which, by being finite, would not dilute the ...”

“... and foul-mouthed behaviour of Townsend especially. Two other runners, however, John Rivett and Edward Fugion, did a thoroughly professional job in following the Irish revolutionary priest James O’Coigley and tracing his associates. In a delightfully libellous caricature by Isaac Cruikshank the runners were imagined not only as a formidable anti-radical ...”

“... essay in appreciation. He also did some delegation in order to complete the work. The life of Edward Young was written by Herbert Croft, who was more diligent than his master in unearthing facts, but whose pastiche of the Johnsonian style painfully illustrates how hard that style is to emulate. Even with these short cuts, and even with the assistance of ...”

“... elite: Michael Manley, the leader of the social democratic People’s National Party, and Edward Seaga, the leader of the conservative Jamaica Labour Party. The Jamaican system of ‘garrisons’ – social housing estates, usually built over bulldozed shantytowns, run by ‘dons’ on behalf of one or other of the parties – was up and running by ...”

“... bait of faits divers. Parisian hoodlums – a particular type known as ‘apaches’ – were said to be keen browsers, partly because the paper loved to relate their fearsome deeds, and in return its editorial line rubbed off on them. They became human parchment for the journal’s opinions: in 1902 the police arrested 15 apaches and found they were ...”

“... of Men’s sight, and of some it is thought they did not so much as confess themselves before they said Mass again.’ Others ‘that had preached against Catholicks, were admitted presently to preach for them’, while ecclesiastical officials ‘that had been Visitors and Commissioners against us, were made Commissioners against the Protestants’, and on ...”

“... when you write,’ his uncle the sculptor Hamo Thornycroft advised him. Sassoon himself wrote to Edward Carpenter (one of his many gurus on a variety of subjects, in this case how to live a free life as a homosexual): ‘I’m one of those people who can only learn things by coming into the closest possible contact with them.’ He was well aware that he ...”

“... of unpalatable truths, while being reproached by more decisive, or more outraged, comrades such as Edward Thompson and John Saville, who left to establish an independent journal. But in the spring of 1957 he accepted the inevitable and left the party.It can be hard now to recover what a volcanic existential crisis this was for those, like Hill, whose lives had ...”

“... known when you’ve got something on your mind. ‘Antarctica – the cruise of a lifetime,’ it said. I sent off for the brochure. In the meantime, I called the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge.‘How can I get to Antarctica?’ I asked.‘Are you a scientist?’‘No, I’m a writer.’It sounded feeble next to the echo of ‘scientist’. The woman ...”

“... what I’d do if they killed him. I was there to give what’s called moral support. I would have said then, and now, that my brother was a nice man through and through, truly decent, and wouldn’t hurt anyone on purpose, unless they weren’t nice or provoked him. But he sure did get himself into some shit. My brother always had unsavoury friends. His ...”