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“... ski jumper Walter Steiner, whose talent he claims to have spotted from the first. ‘This quiet young man had something ecstatic in the way he flew, though technically he still had flaws … His element seemed to be the air, not the earth.’ In 1972 Steiner won gold at the Olympic Games in Sapporo and the World Championships in Planica. In 1974 Herzog made ...”

“... American network television for two months. During those two months, ABC news had 121 stories on Michael Jackson and 42 stories on Natalee Holloway, a high-school student who disappeared from a bar while on holiday in Aruba. CBS news had 235 stories about Michael Jackson and 70 about Natalee Holloway. I heard that in the ...”

“... a skier, climber, trail walker. These activities took precedence, when he was a schoolboy and young student, over academic work. At the age of 15, in 1945, he completed the ascent of Mount St Helens: ‘Step by step, breath by breath – no rush, no pain.’ The newspaper he read when he came down from the hike, on 13 August, was a day-old copy of the ...”

“... normalising relations with the Gulf states. But the devastation of Gaza has aroused anger among young Arabs, and Arab governments that once saw Israel as a useful counterweight to Iran’s ambitions now feel that its aggression and adventurism know no limits. As Mohammed Baharoon, head of a research centre in Dubai, put it, ‘now the madman with a gun is ...”

“... its discourses. The subject, in Auden’s plays, is constructed out of these delusive discourses. Michael Ransom in F6 had acknowledged somewhat abstractly that he, too, was implicated in ‘the web of guilt that prisons every upright person’, that like all the others he is ‘swept and driven by the possessive incompetent fury and the disbelief’. But he ...”

“... a flummery beyond compare, the flummery itself. I take a cab from Gatwick to London driven by a young Indian man who’s about to have an arranged marriage. The Gaelic term for an ‘arranged marriage’ is cleamhnas, and people who’ve had arranged marriages, or are merely related by marriage, are known as clownies, an idea I’m still pondering as I ...”

“... routes in Snowdonia with Mallory just before the Great War and was told by Geoffrey Winthrop Young that he had ‘the finest natural balance’ he had ever seen in a climber. At the height of his enthusiasm he wrote that climbing ‘made all other sports seem trivial’, and in Goodbye to All That he records a fine physical image of the well-being that ...”

“... circuit – at Stockholm in 1960, where he had been introduced by the Cambridge Medieval historian Michael Postan, another Eastern European and the man who discovered Marc Bloch for English-speaking historians – ended in open conflict on the congress floor when the West Germans, led by Vittinghoff with Joseph Vogt in the background, made a ruthless attempt ...”

“... the literary agent, who is the dedicatee of Duffy. Harder to crack is the pseudonymous code of Michael Crichton, the omnicompetent ‘movelist’. (He is author of The Andromeda Strain, director and producer of Coma, director and scriptwriter of Westworld.) Crichton stands six feet seven inches tall. Two of his writing pseudonyms are ‘John Lange’ and ...”

“... a ‘farewell ceremony’ in 18th-century Poland. ‘A certain Miss Szamowska saying goodbye to a young gentleman called Tollohub offered him, as was customary, a glass of wine. Tollohub was already sitting on his horse, ready to ride off. He drank the wine, put the empty glass between the ears of his horse, broke it with one shot of his ...”

“... sent to the painting’s owner. Ficino portrayed the goddess as offering to teach the difficult young man the code of Humanity. Perhaps, then, one can infer that moral allegoresis was accepted, in the owner’s circle, as an appropriate way to understand ancient myths. But neither document entitles us to assume that Botticelli had in mind as he worked any ...”

“... two faces, and don’t necessarily know which is the true one. Peter was then a tall, rosy-cheeked young man with blond hair flopping over his forehead, like an overgrown schoolboy, and I thought if I had been a Russian I would have been inclined to show him my dissident face, if only to avoid disappointing him. His expulsion from the Soviet Union at first ...”

“... alignment, no entrenchment, no permanence. To re-quote de Gaulle: ‘Treaties are like roses and young girls; they last as long as they last.’ Or Palmerston: ‘We have no eternal allies and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual.’ The folding of the Department of International Development into the Foreign Office is an ...”

“... In March 2018, clearly acting on existing suspicions, a South African TV camera homed in on the young Australian player Cameron Bancroft, who in an excruciating sequence of events could be seen doing something to the ball, then hiding something in his trousers, then protesting his innocence to the umpires: look, ump, nothing in my pockets, honest! In the ...”

“... cases seemed heavier than it had when he unloaded it that morning. ‘Maybe there is a beautiful young lady in the box,’ an airport official joked. There was, of course, a person in the box. It was Carlos Ghosn, the former chairman of the world’s largest car manufacturer, Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi. But nobody knew he’d gone missing yet, and the ...”