“... luminous look’. Risen from the pages of Enid Starkie’s Life, here was her hero of heroes, Charles Baudelaire, and he was staring right at her: ‘He wanted to impress himself on me – young clay takes the print better. And the message was totally cynical. It wasn’t a “follow me” message. It was a quizzical, satirical: “You too?”’This is ...”

“... and commercial power to back them up, however, this ended as always seemed probable: Conolly and Charles Stoddart were beheaded in the main square of Bukhara, and Alexander Burnes hacked to death outside his house in Kabul. These misfortunes discouraged further heroics, but did nothing to assuage British fears. In 1837, Iran tried to compensate for its ...”

“... vicious satires against his betters and wound up raving; or the short, fat, gouty corrector Charles de la Motte, described as a ‘pygmy’, a ‘Lilliputian’ and ‘that little figure of papier-mâché’ by the contemporaries who hurled epithets at him with all the zest and accuracy of a literary darts team aiming at a target adorned with the face ...”

“... which is credited with destroying silent cinema. Already primed on the show-biz sensations of Charles Lindbergh’s trans-Atlantic flight and Babe Ruth’s 60 home runs, the 1927 audience reached a new plateau of hysteria. Although The Jazz Singer’s profit margin has been overestimated (by Rogin as well), the movie instantly established Warners as a ...”

“... of our liberties’ (Blackstone) and ‘the great palladium of the liberties of the subject’ (Charles James Fox). Technically known as the writ of habeas corpus ad subjiciendum et recipiendum, it was one of a family of writs containing the words ‘habeas corpus’. Other forms (less long-lived and much less well known) required the body of a person ...”

“... Rejecting the notion that his resentments made Swift an Irish nationalist two centuries before Daniel O’Connell, Deane writes, with some disdain, of ‘the formation of the patriot “persona” as a surrogate identity for a minority group that was parasitically dependent on the polity it attempted to resist’. This is old hat compared to Declan ...”

“... his alleged ignorance, even Nixon accepted some responsibility for the break-in at the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychoanalyst after Ellsberg had embarrassed the Administration with the leaking of the Pentagon Papers. Aitken thinks a comparison can be made between Nixon on Watergate and Henry II’s ‘Who will rid me of this turbulent priest?’ which ...”

“... no discontent to create it.Only a few days after the five Cato Street plotters were executed, Charles Lamb in ‘The Three Graves’ was reserving a special place in hell for the spies:I ask’d the fiend, for whom these rites were meant?‘These graves,’ quoth he, ‘when life’s brief oil is spent,When the dark night comes, and they’re sinking ...”

“... Lipper’s Gulag memoir. Having recruited the US congressman Donald Judd and the Catholic priest Daniel Lyons, Liebman travelled to Taipei and helped draft the league’s agenda; at the league’s 1974 conference William F. Buckley gave the keynote address. And then there was John Singlaub, a retired general and another of the league’s main organisers, who ...”

“... de Pourtalès-Gorgier, also collected contemporary art. The former bought what was believed to be Daniel Maclise’s masterpiece, The Marriage of Strongbow and Aoife (1854), as well as Italian primitives and Raphael’s Saint Catherine. The latter wasn’t only a collector of portraits by Bronzino and Frans Hals, medieval ivories and Greek vases, but a patron ...”

“... and forging links with various Resistance groups: communists, Zionists and supporters of Charles de Gaulle. Over the course of the war, the 6th helped to save as many as ten thousand Jews from deportation. Shatz GalleryOnly four people worked in the lab. The director was a man known as Loutre (‘Otter’). Kaminsky’s assistants, the Schidlof ...”

“... Cooper, Bob Dylan, Marvin Gaye, Roy Orbison, Carl Perkins, Kris Kristofferson, and Natasha and Daniel Bedingfield have variously done before him. The father, of course, the Abraham, or at least the son of the father, the Avraham ben Avraham Avinu, the Charlton Heston of redemption rock, is Johnny Cash, a man of intense spiritual certitude, and enormous ...”

“... of talents: Lucille Ball, Eddie Cantor, Kirk Douglas, Melvyn Douglas, Deanna Durbin, Melvyn Frank, Daniel Fuchs, Henry Fonda, John Garfield, Ava Gardner, Judy Garland, Henry Hathaway, Van Heflin, Fritz Lang, Burt Lancaster, Audie Murphy, Burgess Meredith, Groucho Marx, Vincente Minnelli, Gregory Peck, Vincent Price, Robert Ryan, Edward G. Robinson, Donna ...”

“... accompany him and Satie would entertain them with his knowledge of Parisian history. Pierre-Daniel Templier, his first biographer, painted a charming picture of Satie on the move: ‘When talking he would stop, bend one knee a little, adjust his pince-nez and place his fist on his hip. Then he would take off once more with small, deliberate steps.’He ...”

“... the daylights out of the South so as to soften up the opposition before the main assault. Like Charles Krauthammer, the Washington Post columnist, like the conservatives and liberals who argued for war in 2003, and said that Saddam Hussein, the Hitler of our time, must not be appeased, and this mustn’t turn into Munich all over again, Adelman demanded ...”