“... on the sofa. It was a text from Jamie Byng, the publisher of Canongate. ‘Are you about?’ it said. ‘I have a somewhat left-field idea. It’s potentially very exciting. But I need to discuss urgently.’ Canongate had bought, for £600,000, a memoir by the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange. The book had also been bought for a high sum by Sonny Mehta at ...”

“... would have blown itself apart before any appreciable thermonuclear processes were initiated. Edward Teller and Stanislaw Ulam, émigré scientists from Hungary and Poland respectively, who were working at Los Alamos, found an ingenious solution in 1951. As part of his work on improved fission weapons Ulam had suggested a two-stage fission design. Teller ...”

“... Robert James’s Pharmacopeia Universalis (1747) advised: Mummy resolves coagulated Blood, and is said to be effectual in purging the Head, against pungent Pains of the Spleen, a Cough, Inflation of the body, Obstruction of the Menses and other uterine Affections: Outwardly it is of Service for consolidating Wounds. The Skin is recommended in difficult ...”

“... critic had upbraided him for writing: ‘his shape smalled in the distance.’ But how else, Hardy said, laughing, could he have written it? (Lawrence, who took so much from Hardy, has ‘the dawn is wanly blueing’ in Sea and Sardinia.) It is one of the signal pleasures of Claire Tomalin’s superb new biography that she has an eye for this kind of thing in ...”

“... menfolk might wear simple brogues, but they themselves had shoes of gannets’ skins, and were said to look like “feathered Mercuries”.’ Sometimes brogues rose above the knee, like fisherman’s waders: clearly their rusticity defined them, not their shape. These serviceable homemade brogues could translate a labourer into a nymph, a shepherd into a ...”

“... when intervening on behalf of the miners during the strike of 1984-5: they never gave up, he said, recalling those who had fought alongside him in the trenches, and speaking of them as though they were still alive. As late as the autumn of 1992, when Middle England rose in revolt against the annihilation of the industry, the miner’s labour was ...”

“... recently, we have the eccentric cameos of Richard Cobb and causeries of A.J.P. Taylor, of which he said they were evidence that he had run out of historical subjects. In all, in the genre for which it seems so well designed, the craft of the historian has yielded perhaps only two classics – Gibbon’s graceful mirror at the end of the 18th century, and Henry ...”

“... Migration is said to be good for host cultures. Geographers, demographers and business people believe it is, especially in the US, where one migrant group after another – Jews, Poles, Italians, Irish – has auditioned for a role in the great musical of American identity. The competition has been bitter, especially between newcomers and predecessors, and the typecasting has been crude, yet sooner or later every minority earns its place in the chorus ...”

“... slowly moved off and through into the Waterloo Chamber. ‘Now that I have you to myself,’ said the Queen, smiling to left and right as they glided through the glittering throng, ‘I’ve been longing to ask you about the writer Jean Genet.’ ‘Ah,’ said the president. ‘Oui.’ The ‘Marseillaise’ and the ...”

“... thinking more of the letters Lizzie wrote to him, which he then turned into more sonnets and then said I’m sorry about this at the end.Do you see any kind of road not taken for you in the way Lowell went about things? In all those indiscretions and the abandonment of any consideration for others?Not at all. I don’t like that side of Lowell. Indeed, by the ...”

“... Levant at last – those trudging squares and triangles between houses that I remember from Port Said in 1912, a plank missing from the footbridge, natives grading into Portuguese without shame, a grilling sea-wall, its pavement burst up by the waves, houses built on white piles, with chickens ducks cookery and washing sharing the basement, a desolate and ...”

“... when there was a tentative knock on the door. It was Alec Guinness. He shook Alan’s hand, said, ‘You must be very tired,’ and left. Alan’s languid phone calls were often to do with professional humiliation. In the 1999 production of Antony and Cleopatra at Stratford the curtain rose with Antony on his knees pleasuring the Egyptian queen of ...”

“... Marxist-psychoanalytic-artworld nonsense and agreed with their own mindlessly reasonable practice. Edward Lucie-Smith even seemed to claim personal credit for setting Fuller on the right course: In Fuller’s early, hard-line Marxist days … I once told him that I would respect his criticism more a. if he wrote in a better style, and b. if he showed some ...”

“... to the worst English taste for the mock-Oriental: and I wish that Browning’s fierce sonnet ‘To Edward FitzGerald’ had been chosen amongst the many ‘readings’ of poets by each other which are a feature of the anthology. In Ricks’s edition ‘Maud’ occupies 70 packed pages, some of them with a (justifiably) Falstaffian disproportion between text ...”

“... It found no favour at all with the British. Nor did it with the State Department. Stimson said that being tough or soft with the Germans was not the issue. The issue was ‘whether the course proposed will in fact attain our agreed objective, continued peace’. The massacre of some American prisoners of war in the Ardennes offensive by an SS ...”