“... concerning them manage to be as much about Schoenberg as anything else. Robert Simpson and Peter Maxwell Davies are given such occluded treatment that one might be forgiven for not recognising them at all. But it is the holes that I deplore. Bach is a pious shadow rather than a solid substance; the rest of the Baroque is altogether absent. So are whole ...”

“... scripts of the earliest Middle Ages, with a sleek and limpid Caroline minuscule that anyone can read today after a few minutes’ practice. More than two-thirds of the ancient Latin literature we have today was in circulation under Charlemagne’s heirs in the ninth century, and not much that enjoyed a Carolingian revival was subsequently lost. But the ...”

“... New York Times thought the most charitable speculation was that it had been ‘dictated but never read, neither by the former prime minister nor by his publishers’. After​ the brief and futile interlude of James Callaghan’s premiership, a new Tory prime minister entered Downing Street in May 1979. Almost thirty years before, at the 1950 general ...”

“... although he doesn’t know if the Medici (to one of whom, Lorenzo, The Prince is dedicated) had read Machiavelli’s book, ‘they grabbed the principality of Florence, and turned the republic into a duchy.’ The stage was set for Machiavelli as a republican cacodemon too devious for his own good. In Elizabethan and Jacobean drama ‘Machiavel’ was ...”

“... Lorem ipsum font-sample text first used by Letraset in the 1960s, but once by far the most widely read and influential of all ancient philosophy in the West. Sometimes the introduction of the material is straightforward, even clunky: ‘I came across that passage in one of his speeches’; ‘Cicero quickly dictated a final message to his wife and ...”

“... who was responsible for the ridiculing of his father? Seventeenth-century clergymen such as Peter Heylyn veered between embracing the racial version of this story and dismissing it as ‘a foolish tale’. (Heylyn did both, at different moments in his life.) Some 19th-century commentators tripped on the awkward question of how stuffy old Noah had become ...”

“... what makes his book especially interesting is how he came to know what he claims to know. He has read everything on the Afghan insurgency and the civil wars that followed, and has been given access to the original manuscript of Robert Gates’s memoir (Gates was director from 1991 to 1993), but his main source is some two hundred interviews conducted between ...”

“... innovate only because they already knew a great deal about what was expected of them. They could read the signals, and decipher the signs, in large public gatherings; above all, they knew how to follow a lead. ‘What is needed,’ Ober writes, ‘is a body of decision makers capable of recognising (through social knowledge) who really is expert, and capable ...”

“... gentleman who told Bathurst about his reluctant withdrawal from the pleasures of life was Sir Peter de la Billière, commander-in-chief of British forces during the first Gulf War, whose deafening began when he was still in his twenties (he was born in 1934). He was downgraded on the basis of his poor hearing at the age of 36, but appealed and was ...”

“... In one meeting, Woodward reports, Cohn lost his patience with Trump and his favoured economic guru Peter Navarro, who had been reinforcing the president’s view that trade deficits mean America is getting screwed. ‘“If you just shut the fuck up and listen,” Cohn said to both Trump and Navarro, “you might learn something.”’ The only possible source ...”

“... early verse tales, The Giaour (1813), The Corsair (1814), Lara (1814) and others, have long been read as revealing in the worst way – reliant on ‘facile techniques’, uncommitted and unconvinced, marred in their judgments by a ‘fatal distaste for self-criticism’, as Philip Martin puts it. In J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, the dodgy English professor ...”

“... to put my forty-year-old letters in order, I come across a diary for 1956-59. It’s depressing to read as very little of it is factual and most of it to do with my slightly sickening obsession with, coupled with a lack of insight into, my own character. It’s full of embarrassing resolutions about future conduct and exhortations to myself to do better. Love ...”

“... pre-conference skirmishers were all on the left. The hardly well-kept secret leaked out that Peter Mokaba, the fiery head of the youth section, had had a career as a police informer. Mokaba has become so prominent that it would be embarrassing for the ANC leadership to admit to this, so we suddenly found him cropping up at Mandela’s side to welcome ...”

“... of climatic irregularities – acid rain, the Milankovitch theory, negative feedback loops – read like so many Gothic shockers. Texts as grim as Aids philippics present themselves as cures for cancer. They raise spectres of hope in places where hope cannot live. The age demands its technical primers, its books of instruction. We must prepare ourselves ...”

“... Germany – an action predicated on German defeat and thus treasonable. According to Owings, who read the transcripts of their meetings, to vote in this new state one would have had to be 27 and male. Freya von Moltke believes this is a mistake: ‘I know my husband didn’t think that way.’ Whatever the truth, middle-class resistance groups were often ...”