“... with his achingly empty hands, robbed of his masculine model, the football-playing man, the cross-country-skiing man, a man who stood his ground, who never let his gaze drop, but looked everyone boldly in the eye.’ But this isn’t Jim’s situation. He is defined by an absence that has no shape, that can hardly even aspire to the condition of ...”

“... in scale, reach and technical capacity. Sophisticated protocols developed by the UN, the Red Cross and others meant that relief agencies could work in warzones, provide assistance across front lines, negotiate local truces and create protected spaces. Progress in the drive to end famine stalled with crises in Somalia (2011), Syria (from 2012), South ...”

“... early 1970s but loathed it. ‘Never again,’ he said, no matter the money. A number of writers, Anthony Thwaite among them, taught in Kuwait or the desert emirates and had stories of segregated classrooms and beheadings.‘You’re a traveller?’ Dorothy Pritchett said to me, and, giggling in anticipation, ‘Do you have a rooksack?’ Puffing his pipe and ...”

“... a perpetual, honking stream, over the Lea and away into the comparative safety of Leyton, Whipps Cross and Epping Forest. The mulch zones in which inner city crimes are finally buried. They do things differently there. These are places people have chosen to escape towards. The school could be anywhere, but it happens to be in this lost settlement, hiding in ...”

“... word ‘synoptic’ should not be taken to suggest any idea of shortness. Fludd’s writings, said Anthony à Wood, sounding rather daunted, ‘were great, many and mystical’. His magnum opus was the Utriusque Cosmi Historia, which offered nothing less than a ‘technical, physical and metaphysical history of the macrocosm and the microcosm’. This appeared ...”

“... whatever brisk agent provocateur Walsingham has put in place. ‘Farewell, sweet Robyn,’ writes Anthony Babington to Robert Poley, who was one of the men who stood by as Marlowe was stabbed. ‘Farewell, sweet Robyn, if as I take thee true to me.’ Poley was anything but true: and Babington, briefly strung-up but fully conscious, was shortly afterwards ...”

“... printed letters without his permission: ‘Don’t do it again.’ He meant business. He wrote to Anthony Burgess in June 1988: ‘I hear you have been attacking me rather severely on a French television programme ... You have thought it relevant to attack me because of my age (I don’t see the point). You should have checked your facts. I happen to be 83 ...”

“... or Schröder of Eastern Europe, but his failed modernisation project – supposedly inspired by Anthony Giddens – and bribery scandals involving both socialists and liberals, led people instead to equate the left with capitalism and corruption. Every Saturday, menacing groups of men, young and old, dressed in black would gather outside parliament to blast ...”

“... The lab in Wuhan. Abortion. Marxists. The Pizza Paedophiles. Hollywood. Muslims. Mexicans. Anthony Fauci. The EPA.The politics of an empire in decline are invariably a mixture of the cruel and the ludicrous. (Ask the Brits.) Nonetheless, the American case is distinctive, and its special character worth examining, if we’re to understand the kind of ...”

“... story, they have no narrative as such and work as separate units. At worst, they read like a cross between R.D. Laing’s case-notes and Richard Aldington’s Imagism. At best, they have a force and integrity which none of the other poets associated with the Review, and few poets since, have come close to matching. The problem, as Hamilton concedes in ...”

“... In the invasion of Europe du Maurier was commissioned as Maxwell and won a good Military Cross. Haines records a later episode which, if it had appeared in one of the rival, writ-beset biographies, one would have hesitated to mention. In a letter to his newly-married wife Maxwell described an attack on a German town the mayor of which was persuaded ...”

“... modelled on the one at the Library of Congress, to track every political dissident in the country, cross-indexed by organisation and location. It grew to hundreds of thousands of names: anarchists, Bolsheviks, socialists, pacifists, union leaders, Black newspaper editors (‘as they are beyond doubt exciting the negro elements of this country to ...”

“... Churchill played host at a country-house weekend. The queen had her to tea at Buckingham Palace. Anthony Eden took her to the movies. Drawbell wasn’t satisfied. In the book he wrote about Thompson’s visit – Dorothy Thompson’s English Journey, now deservingly out of print – he envisioned the ‘scene that would have been played out’ if she had ...”

“... Ronald Colman to David Niven. I particularly enjoyed the Yorkshire TV series in the 1970s, with Anthony Valentine as a notably suave and sinister Raffles and Christopher Strauli as a frightened Bunny. The combination of mannered elegance and genuine nervous tension never fails.Ernest William Hornung, always known as Willie, was born in Middlesbrough in ...”

“... for the New York Times, is the best in the world – but Held et al. have done the reading, the cross-referencing and the pondering. Friedman goes wrong in the way that good, attention-grabbing journalists often go wrong when they set out to write at length. He tends to fall back on the belief that the world he is describing started only when he began to ...”