“... 1980s by such outfits as KKR (Kohlberg Kravis Roberts), Carlyle and Blackstone.Abraaj was soon a major player in parts of the world that are problematically described as ‘emerging’ or ‘frontier’ markets. It bought out Aramex (a Jordanian courier firm), Karachi Electric (a utility company) and Spinneys, which operates supermarkets across the Arab ...”

“... only in the South. The government sought to destroy King’s reputation. With the authorisation of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, the FBI listened in on his phone calls with close associates and planted informers in his circle. Convinced the civil rights movement was a communist plot, J. Edgar Hoover’s G-men gathered recordings of his trysts with women ...”

“... autumn of 1928, a previously unknown painting turns up on the London art market. It belongs to a Major Henry Howard of Surrey. He is 45 years old. His father has just died and left him a large estate, and he’s selling off much of it – houses, land, family heirlooms. There are death duties; he has five young daughters and a marriage that’s going to end ...”

“... The West would simply send more. A much better way was to gain secret control of the West’s major intelligence service, the CIA, by recruiting moles among its officers and by sending false defectors. These false detectors could feed the CIA wrong information about the Soviet Union and the moles could report on how this information was being ...”

“... Denis: ‘Marnie – wig, smell and all’; ‘Sam Smith, MP for Flint and religious bore’; ‘John Bulman, tutor, whisky lover and cheat’; ‘The misery of picnics’; ‘The Palship, dressed to kill ... ’ In triumphant contrast, there is: ‘Myself at 11, fisherman, child musicologist and budding atheist’. A Welsh Childhood is also strengthened by ...”

“... portraits of the Thirties (and, if there were more space, a related de Kooning and ideally a John Graham too, but at all events one such Gorky). Rosenthal’s view was that ‘in no way’ could such a painting be ‘described as one of the most central works of 20th-century American art. Gorky’s significance was to come later, in the last few years of ...”

“... suddenly that Germany was not the peaceful country he had long supposed, but one run by Junkers? John Grigg, whose work receives all too little recognition in this book, has pointed out that Lloyd George’s sympathy with France was nothing new. He had shown it 13 years earlier over Fashoda. The new revelation concerned Germany. In Professor Gilbert’s ...”

“... of them, the sudden spate of prosecutions and executions in Holland between 1730-32 is a fact of major significance. Louis Crompton has referred to these ‘Dutch Massacres’ as the first genocide of homosexuals in Western civilisation, but the contributors to ’Tis Nature’s Fault adopt a more sober tone. Trumbach puts the number of those executed at ...”

“... to her reputation as a great beauty. Certainly, it is not a flattering portrait, of the kind that John Singer Sargent was producing for a satisfied clientèle. If we compare it to a slightly later Sargent portrait – Lady Agnew, for example – we find the pose of Cassatt’s subject far more rigid, the costume and decor more severe; the tell-tale signs of ...”

“... We think now of Margaret Thatcher and Ken Livingstone, but the pattern can be traced back to King John, when London sneaked its own municipal charter under the lee of the barons, and even before. From almost the start, the dominance of Roman London in the affairs of Britain was a surprise, and shakily defined. But the climax came in the 17th century, in ...”

“... Nearby was Portman Square, another highly-sought rectangle, the contractor for which was John Elwes, scion of a family of congenital and pathological misers, himself one of the London rich. For a long period these proud squares stood incongruously on the edge of open country, highwayman-haunted. There was much to be said for a mansion in Grosvenor ...”

“... the hands and clothes – are more distinctly Lavaterian in inspiration. (Barbara Hardy and John Carey have illuminatingly anatomised the significance of clothes as an index of character in Dickens and Thackeray, without invoking physiognomy.) But the truth is that after the effective build-up in the background chapters which comprise half of his ...”

“... model to which thinking on these issues would try to conform. The model is that provided by John Stuart Mill’s essay On Liberty, and the doctrine that it endorses runs something like this: some people like obscenity, and some don’t, and those who don’t tend to find it filthy, horrible, revolting, and, probably, immoral. But even if obscenity is ...”

“... real Pig Islander’. A story she told me more than once was of how my great-great-grandfather John Flatt, a lay catechist, had fallen out with the Church Missionary Society by suggesting that its missionaries in New Zealand were acquiring too much Maori land. Twenty years ago, in the British Museum, I looked up evidence Flatt gave, while in London in ...”

“... extensive knowledge. When he wants to tell us what a good scholar Housman was, he quotes the late John Carter’s comment on the testimonials supplied by various scholars when Housman was candidate for the Chair of Latin at University College, London. ‘Perhaps only those conversant with the trades-union of Academe,’ wrote Carter, ‘can appreciate to the ...”