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“... real violence, this story could have made a subject for a latter-day Tintin adventure: Meinesz the young hero, his colleague Boudouresque a faithful Snowy, Doumenge the villain in his forbidding clifftop citadel, munching Mediterranean laverbread with Prince Rainier and conniving with the sinister Giuseppe Giaccone – an algal specialist at the University of ...”

“... know that the spoils of German rocket technology were unequally divided after the war: a handsome young aristocrat, Wernher von Braun, a major in the SS and the inventor of the V2 rocket, made it to the US with as many papers, instruments and scientists (118) as he could manage. (Von Braun had worked from Mittelwerk, a production factory in the Harz ...”

“... Hitler’ sounds like a tremendous tease, but it’s not – Unity loved Hitler and would die young because of him – and the reader of these letters feels baffled at the way the posh style celebrates and ennobles naivety. Those orchids blossom and sour in the mind; how can so much life be in thrall to so much death, and to what account? Yet there is ...”

“... the notion that poetry is not for everybody. Here’s Cecil Day Lewis in 1947, trying to get them young: ‘Poetry won’t help you to get ahead in life.’ This is the sort of thing superior persons say, or men who think the main object in life is to make money. Poetry, they imply, is all very well for highbrows and people with plenty of time to waste, but ...”

“... civil-military dysfunction, chronicled in an important book called Dereliction of Duty (1997) by a young army officer named H.R. McMaster. The story McMaster tells is one of mistrust, calculated dishonesty and mutual manipulation ending in a mindless debacle. Since then the civil-military balance in Washington has shifted according to which party is in power ...”

“... tricky to take pictures (photographing soldiers is illegal). It’s quite normal for children as young as four to take themselves to and from school on their own. Anyone who can afford them owns Chinese knock-offs of cutesy Japanese stuff – should the regime ever fall, the owner of the first Hello Kitty franchise will make a fortune. There’s very little ...”

“... to James Barry’s 1776 engraving The Phoenix or the Resurrection of Freedom. In the engraving Andrew Marvell is depicted with Milton, Locke and Algernon Sidney among the mourners at the bier of Britain’s traditional liberties. Across a pond the mourners can see a Neoclassical rotunda with an eagle-like phoenix raising its strong wings. Below the cupola ...”

“... becoming possible through the advances in the physical and chemical techniques of the 1930s. The young scientist was John Kendrew, one of many inspired by such conversations to win the Nobel Prize, which escaped his travel companion. But it might have been anyone, male or female, who ever came within earshot of that stumpy, bohemian visionary genius with the ...”

“... mountaineer who died on the mountain in 1924, close to the summit, which he and his companion, Andrew Irvine, may or may not have reached. Since then there has been an unseemly rush to cash in on the discovery with at least six books, a poor film made by the BBC, several websites and the syndication of photographic rights across the globe. Peter ...”

“... in the garden. ‘The world does not understand the radical teachings of the Prophet,’ Uncle Andrew admonished us as we ripped out pages from the books, filled with Berg’s sexualised teachings and pictures of naked children. I tried not to look at them. As we shredded the pages and threw them into our makeshift incinerator – an old washing machine ...”

“... blokes of whom he approves. Bill Clinton is ‘a great guy’, as is the Taoiseach John Bruton. Andrew Smith is ‘a nice guy’, and so is Guy Verhofstadt; Andrew Adonis is ‘a thoroughly nice guy’. John Hutton is also ‘a thoroughly nice guy’, while the footmen at Balmoral are ‘very nice guys’. The president ...”

“... people saying that nature had given him an abundance of masters.His fame grew, particularly among young painters, but the complaint that he had somehow avoided higher tasks – invention and the creation of ideal beauty – was still voiced by his peers. To need models (not just for studies, but to paint your figure composition from) made the artist a mere ...”

“... hit a lung and the heart, causing massive internal bleeding. He had no chance of survival. Captain Andrew Cox dispatched a helicopter to pick up the injured man and bring him back to base. The helicopter carried him to camp Abu Naji where he was ventilated, but his pupils became fixed and at 00.50 hrs on 2 May 2005, surrounded by medical officers, Guardsman ...”

“... is about as far as the author goes in helping out his audience; and Lermontov, a sophisticated young man who had read all the books of the time, was doubtless familiar with the German concept of ‘romantic irony’, expounded by Tieck; and knew that you can look at a mountain both with awe and wonder, and with a certain amusement that you should be ...”

“... Andrew Crozier has lately written an exceptionally searching essay about British poetry since 1945,* in which Norman MacCaig is named just once in passing. There is nothing wrong with that; Crozier isn’t attempting one of those limp ‘surveys’ in which everyone who deserves mention gets it. All the same I have the impression that a nod in passing – usually, it’s true, complimentary – is the most that MacCaig normally gets from any of us ...”