“... John Le Carré called it ‘the Abteilung’, but the real name of the East German foreign intelligence department was the Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung, or Main Intelligence Directorate, and the man who ran it for almost 34 years was Markus Wolf. When the Berlin Wall fell, three years after his retirement in 1986, Wolf was courted by other intelligence services – West German, American, even Israeli – who hoped to exploit his vulnerable position ...”

“... arranged,’ Virginia Woolf wrote, disparaging the kind of fiction associated with Arnold Bennett, John Galsworthy and H.G. Wells. It’s a proposition that might appeal to Simon Okotie. But before deciding whether it has merit he would want to see whether an apparently symmetrical arrangement of gig-lamps might not, on close examination, prove ever so ...”

“... Party general secretary, and Sir Oswald Mosley in for a heart-to-heart. The interview with Mosley took place only in January 1940 – it is one of the best things in this book. Mosley ‘adopted at once an attitude of extreme affability and disarming frankness’. Displaying the same charm he had used to explain the finances and activities of the British ...”

“... had been hyped, in 1885, as ‘The Most Amazing Story Ever Written’. The humble-hearted Haggard took more pride in being twice a knight. His father, a Norfolk squire, had deemed him unfit to be a greengrocer, but he had become not just another, and richer, Norfolk squire, but a respected agriculturist, a man of affairs and a colourful choice for ...”

“... Mark Micale’s book opens with a scene from John Huston’s film Freud: The Secret Passion (1962), which re-creates one of Jean-Martin Charcot’s legendary demonstrations of hypnosis before an audience of doctors at the Salpêtrière. With magical ease, Charcot makes two patients’ hysterical symptoms disappear ...”

“... There’s a scene in Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction in which John Travolta’s character, a hitman called Vincent Vega, who has escorted his boss’s wife home after an evening out, returns from the bathroom to find her unconscious on the floor. Mia (Uma Thurman) has taken a bag of heroin from his jacket pocket and, mistaking the white powder for cocaine, snorted a line and collapsed ...”

“... Vague – reviewed Kapò, a film by Gillo Pontecorvo about the concentration camps. Rivette took exception to a tracking shot in the film, showing a woman who had killed herself. For him, the intrusive camera movement was a serious moral trespass: ‘The man who decides at this moment to track forward and reframe the dead body in a low-angle shot ...”

“... and intellectuals, including Stalin, Einstein, Henry Ford, Mussolini, Fritz Kreisler, Thomas Mann, John Dos Passos, H.L. Mencken, Anatole France, H.G. Wells, the dean of Harvard Law School, Roscoe Pound and 205 members of the law school’s 1927 graduating class. Interest in the case did not die with the men’s executions. It has been the subject of countless ...”

“... English aristocracy has always been hard to draw, and perhaps never more so than in the case of John Charles Wallop, third Earl of Portsmouth. Born in 1767 at the family’s Hampshire residence of Hurstbourne Park, Wallop grew into a child who betrayed signs of being what his contemporaries would have called a simpleton. He was sent to be tutored by the ...”

“... But parties did quickly emerge, producing strange electoral results. The electors in 1796 chose John Adams, a leading Federalist, for president. Jefferson, his Republican rival, came second, becoming vice president. Four years later, when Jefferson again sought the presidency, Burr became his running mate. A few Republican electors were supposed to cast ...”

“... might use his wife solely to beget legitimate heirs, otherwise ignoring or abusing her while he took mistresses at will. The struggle for free marital choice, exempt from parental meddling, still furnished Restoration dramatists and 19th-century novelists with plots. Within this harsh picture, Burger maintains, conduct books brightened the moral prospects ...”

“... revolution (sometimes called the Second Reconstruction), a wholesale shift in historical outlook took place. Today, Reconstruction is seen as a noble effort to create the foundation of racial justice in the aftermath of slavery. The tragedy is not that it was attempted, but that it failed.Johnson’s reputation has fluctuated along with historians’ views ...”

“... out, Haydon, gave his paintings to the new National Gallery in his lifetime. As museums grew and took over from cabinets of curiosities they brought with them the organising systems of curatorship that we still use to classify art. Scholarship and order came in, novelty and showmanship went out. Late Georgian London had the best of both worlds. Haydon could ...”

“... He had one illusion – France; and one disillusion – mankind, including Frenchmen.’ John Maynard Keynes’s description of the political philosophy of Georges Clemenceau, who led France through the end of the First World War, applies even more to the country’s most illustrious leader of the 20th century, Charles de Gaulle ...”

“... home: Philby in Ambala, India, son of the eccentric explorer of Arabia (and Ford motor agent) St John Philby; Sorge in Baku, Russia to a German petroleum engineer and his Russian wife, the daughter of a prosperous capitalist from Kiev. Politically, Sorge’s lineage was even more exotic than Philby’s: while his father was a staunch subject of the ...”