“... Iris Murdoch was not dead before the battle for her memory began. Her husband John Bayley’s first volume of reminiscences, Iris: A Memoir, was published when she was in the later stages of dementia, an undignified, soul-stripping illness whose details Bayley did not spare. After her death in 1999 things sped up ...”

“... full of confidence. Her first action was to move her bed out of her mother’s room and have Sir John Conroy, her mother’s intimate adviser, banished from court. Such determination, veering at times into wilfulness, continued undiminished until her death, 64 years later. By then she was Empress of India, and thanks to the carefully planned marriages of her ...”

“... and reward the interest of a mass readership. Direction, sometimes amounting to misdirection, is John Mullan’s topic. ‘As the title of this book suggests, Dickens’s artfulness is often an almost impudent trickery.’ To illustrate what he means by artfulness amounting to trickery, Mullan draws on a rather different scene in Oliver Twist, in which ...”

“... When British rule came to an end and civil war broke out within the Irish Free State, his father took the side of the new government, in which he subsequently became Foreign Minister. Through his mother, an Ulster Presbyterian by origin, he also acquired contacts in the North quite unusual among Dublin politicians. To the experience of growing up in a ...”

“... the simultaneous Allied landings in Normandy. These onslaughts, and the subsequent ones that took the Red Army half-way across Germany, displayed common themes. As mentioned earlier, the Soviet staff and field commanders during the latter stages of the war were of a high calibre. Some of them, like Zhukov, had been at the centre of events from the ...”

“... have been called – and perhaps was – ‘How many children has Lady Macbeth now?’ But he took enough intellectual lore for granted to get pretty quickly to Hamlet or Coriolanus. If Bateson or Knights had been lecturing to the Conference at Reading, I don’t think they would have reached a poem or a play: political entanglements, disguised as ...”

“... fabulous wealth and bad behaviour that persisted well after his death. In the late 17th century, John Aubrey (who was good on anecdotes though not quite so strong on truth) recorded that he once got one of Elizabeth’s maids of honour up against a tree. She protested with ‘Will you undoe me? Nay, sweet Sir Walter! Sweet Sir Walter! Sir Walter! At last as ...”

“... isolation and hostility displayed by Mao’s regime since the Korean War were about to end. Zhou took steps to encourage this frail optimism. He turned his attention to Britain. The United States, still imposing a trade embargo, remained Communist China’s great enemy; France, traumatised after defeat at Dien Bien Phu that May, had little to offer. But ...”

“... fucking business. Concentrate on what’s there.’ It’s a good answer, and Ayckbourn no doubt took it kindly and got the point. But it bothers Michael Billington, who can’t tell the story without cleaning it up, indeed turning it into a testimonial. ‘That was not brusqueness or rudeness – Ayckbourn testifies that Pinter was an extremely nice guy ...”

“... from the 19th-century reformulation of classical mechanics. The economists’ ‘utility’ took the place of the physicists’ ‘potential energy’. In the later period examined in Machine Dreams, the key external impetus is no longer classical physics. It is the digital computer and ‘cyborg sciences’: new fields (such as cybernetics, artificial ...”

“... every dialect spoken from Lyon to Naples. He immediately set about getting himself expelled, and took ship for India in 1842 as an ensign in the East India Company army. Burton’s fame as an Orientalist rests chiefly on his 1880s translations. But he earned his spurs forty years earlier when, as Kennedy demonstrates, he became an ‘exemplary agent of the ...”

“... concerned with postwar Japan highly classified, in violation of its own laws. Most important, John Foster Dulles, President Truman’s special envoy to Japan charged with ending the occupation, wrote the peace treaty of 1951 in such a way that most former POWs and civilian victims of Japan are prevented from obtaining any form of compensation from either ...”

“... very soon, I lose the markers by which I have navigated, the beacons by which I know myself. Like John Clare leaving the tight circle of experience around the village of Helpston (then in Northamptonshire), I step out of my knowledge, to the tottering edge of an abyss known as ‘the future’ or ‘the human contract’. Mortality. Of place and ...”

“... and plans’ for a ‘gracious new neighbourhood of seemly working-class houses’, which he took round to his old friend Nye Bevan, ‘the newly appointed Minister of Health’ – post-1945, that is. However, towards the 1981 exhibition, the Marquise de la Fregonniére, as Mrs Gillson had by then become, referred me to London agents with whom her copy ...”

“... including first-rate 18th-century portraits by Thomas Gainsborough, Joshua Reynolds, Arthur Devis, John Opie, Jonathan Richardson and Richard Cosway, among others. The small, unattributed canvas he disposes of in 1928 is not in the same league. But it does come with an intriguing back story. Most of Henry Howard’s family’s wealth originally came from sugar ...”