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“... disparaged the culture of gift-giving on which that influence seemed to rely. The diplomat David Urquhart’s neurosis about Russian influence at Constantinople derived from his failure to persuade Ottoman officials to accept his proposals for a free-trade treaty; his Eurocentric perspective led him to smell a Russian plot. Britain used its naval power ...”

“... deal with. Rather, he treats it as something the biographer must get out of his way. It is as if Herbert Spencer or John Stuart Mill, not Mrs Gaskell, herself a novelist, had descended on Haworth parsonage to decipher the lives of the makers of Gondal. Holden is too new to the world of theatre talk to have got all his details right, let alone arrange them ...”

“... same thing, but not sketchily, and across a very wide range of films; and the central argument of David Bordwell’s book is similar. Perez is interested in ‘the properties and possibilities of the medium’, but thinks that what distinguishes them is their variousness. ‘Most theorists have attempted to define the nature of film as something ...”

“... no sustained narratives of disease. Autobiographies in the shadow of death were rare and brief. In David Hume’s six-page-long account of his life there are four sentences about his impending end: ‘I was struck with a disorder in my bowels which at first gave me no alarm, but has since, as I apprehend it, become mortal and incurable. I now reckon upon a ...”

“... Palmerston in the notorious case of Don Pacifico, which Rodger only mentions in passing. David Pacifico was a merchant of Portuguese-Jewish descent, who enjoyed British citizenship by virtue of being born in Gibraltar. He had various dodgy claims against the Greek government, which Pam decided to uphold by instructing Parker (again) to blockade ...”

“... and time horizons – and a quite extraordinary proliferation of specialist journals. David Cannadine, in an influential but pessimistic article, has argued that this is a sign of the subject’s decadence: that it involves knowing more and more about less and less. I prefer to see it as a sign of history’s generosity, and its readiness to ...”

“... lithe, an inspired mimic. Everyone who met him, even those who disliked him, felt his vitality. David ‘Bunny’ Garnett noticed his ‘beautiful lively, blue eyes’, and that he was ‘very light in his movements’. He also maintained that Lawrence’s hair colour, or non-colour – it was reddish-fair – was characteristically working-class. When a ...”

“... will starve to death if we take out from the country whatever we need.’ It was written by Herbert Backe, state secretary of the Reich Ministry for Food and Agriculture. While the memo left the number of victims blank, Backe’s arithmetic suggested that the entire urban population of the European Soviet Union – thirty million ‘surplus ...”

“... in need of constant protection. Menacing ‘jungles’ have become the exotic ‘rainforests’ of David Attenborough documentaries, shrinking islands of environmental purity. The adjective ‘wild’, once applied to the savage creatures and barbarous landscapes of postlapsarian nature, has been reduced to a mark of culinary approbation. In Ruth Pavey’s ...”

“... criticised Coates’s ideas, from a variety of positions.* He treats Marcel Duchamp, New Labour, Herbert Marcuse and US affirmative action policies as if they are all part of the same continuous trend. More important, Kaufmann gives too little consideration to the difference between top-down initiatives – the celebration of diversity in advertising ...”

“... of blessings’ – the title of the novel she appears in. (The quotation is borrowed from George Herbert, one of Pym’s favourite poets.) Gently mocking self-love, Pym’s novels find redemption in commonplace pleasures – though without sanctimony. ‘The trivial round, the common task,’ Belinda repeats from Keble’s hymn ‘New Every Morning Is the ...”

“... his younger brother Hamo at Gallipoli and his beloved ‘poor Tommy’, his fellow Welch Fusilier David Thomas – nourished his Homeric rage, which, in a uniquely Sassoonian way, led him to take the whole burden of war on himself as a kind of cosmic personal insult:I want to smash someone’s skull; I want to have a scrap and get out of the war for a bit or ...”

“... Daisy Hildyard, Colin Kidd, James Meek, Ferdinand Mount, Jan-Werner Müller, Jonathan Parry, David RuncimanNeal Ascherson‘On​ 17 June poor France fell. That day, as we trudged past Greenwich … a tug skipper yelled gaily across the water: “Now we know where we are! No more bloody allies!”’ The writer A.P. ...”

“... the secrets behind better Bombs. Success in achieving either, as the physicist and historian David Kaiser has argued, depended on resolving a problem about secrecy that was at once philosophical and political. If scientific and technological knowledge was crucial, did it come in discrete units, some of which needed special protection while others were ...”

“... woman universally admired, a diamond geezer, should prove capable of creating such an unmitigated herbert. Dalgleish peaked early in a landscape James caught as well as any mainstream novelist: Ely, the Suffolk coast, bleakness everywhere. Empty churches, disappointed lives. Modest Sapphic alliances, inactive adulterers, and, representing hope, some feisty ...”