“... Oxford. When asked at their trial in April 1973 whether he was on the lookout for ‘coloured young men’, Ridgewell replied: ‘On the Northern Line I would agree with that.’ The case was thrown out because the judge, Gwyn Morris, had serious concerns about the conduct of Ridgewell’s squad (‘I find it terrible,’ he said, ‘that here in London ...”

“... an Edinburgh pavement: ‘It’s a grand thing to get leave to live.’ Her image as an ardent young woman graces the Royal Bank of Scotland £5 note. There’s a growing academic literature. Every year brings a stream of new tributes. A play performed at the Pitlochry Festival Theatre last year – Nan Shepherd: Naked and Unashamed – captures the tenor ...”

“... servants framed, implemented and ran them. Late in the administration of Lindsay’s predecessor Robert Wagner, there had been some notably unsuccessful efforts at incorporating community participation in anti-poverty programmes. Lindsay, and his young mayoral aides, all newcomers to the day-to-day management of City ...”

“... strong influence at this crisis: she imagined him in the dock, defying the authorities rather like Robert Emmet, and she said she would never speak to him again if he fled the country. She was a famous patriotic poet (she published under the name ‘Speranza’) and was closely associated with the Fenian Movement. In 1882, Wilde told a lecture audience in San ...”

“... of that time for the benefit of readers who may misremember it as well as those who are too young to remember it for themselves. Both writers devise a rhetorical strategy for their rescue missions. Donald adopts the methods of empiricist historiography, withholding so far as possible his own comments on the events of Wolfe’s life and restricting his ...”

“... His host in Shropshire, Martin Wilkinson, recalls a local pub in which Chatwin, looking up ‘as a young farmhand came in steaming from his work in the fields, observed: “What an odalisque.” Bruce’s italics.’ George Melly is startled that Chatwin has never heard of the Muppets. Don McCullin, on a picture assignment for the Sunday Times magazine, rings ...”

“... At the tail-end of 1892 Robert Louis Stevenson was working on a novel. The book was going well but one thing was bothering him. Serial publication, he felt, might be difficult to secure, since ‘The Justice Clerk’ – it would eventually be published as Weir of Hermiston – was both ‘queer’ and ‘pretty Scotch ...”

“... Nancy thought him thick, and was determined that he should be swapped for one of the brilliant young men she was meanwhile collecting for weekends at Cliveden, the gigantic Astor château on the Thames. Pennant died in the trenches in 1915, leaving Phyllis shattered but free to find a beau ‘in intellectual circles’. Nancy recruited her circle from Lord ...”

“... then use other methods to navigate the surrounding genetic territory. This technique has allowed Robert Plomin and his colleagues to localise what they consider to be an ‘intelligence gene’ – a factor affecting the variation in g scores in a sample of Ohio schoolchildren. Unfortunately, Ridley assumes that the marker used by Plomin (a gene called ...”

“... of 1988, which read the work as determined by personal feeling, and the more scholarly accounts of Robert Ackerman and Hugh Lloyd-Jones which located her ‘at the heart’ of the (so-called) Cambridge Ritualists. Reluctant to offer an alternative myth, yet anxious to avoid already trampled ground, Beard instead explores Harrison’s formative years in ...”

“... Secret service memoirs are invariably rubbished. When Robert Anderson’s Lighter Side of My Official Life appeared in 1910 – Anderson had headed a counter-Fenian agency – Winston Churchill lambasted it in the House of Commons for its ‘gross boastfulness’: ‘It is written, if I may say so, in the style of “How Bill Adams Won the Battle of Waterloo” ...”

“... his siblings – made a fortune as a builder after Rome became the capital of a unified Italy. The young Roberto led the life of a playboy. He dropped out of high school and ‘spent money on cars, flowers, women and clothes’, Gallagher tells us. ‘He took twenty or thirty people to supper every night. A lot of money he gave away casually.’ Before he was ...”

“... this systematically and over a period of time. Some time after Walsingham’s death, his colleague Robert Beale recalled that he had engaged ‘some’ of the secretaries in the French Embassy to betray the secrets of French and Scottish ‘dealings’, which was to say, the convolution at the heart of mid-Elizabethan politics: the question of Mary Queen of ...”

“... Davidian, and rushed back to tell everyone. When Jones got to the compound, Koresh was talking to Robert Rodriguez, an ATF agent who had gone undercover as a Davidian. Rodriguez left the building and informed his superiors, but they decided to go ahead with the raid anyway. By the time the ATF team arrived at the compound at around 9.40 a.m., the Davidians ...”

“... system, or stardust. The electrical wires of the nerves, the mainframe of the brain. We start young: my train-obsessed three-year-old thinks of his digestive tract as a track, as if it were a series of signalling booths and stations. Why not? Is this metaphor any less apt than memory as data storage, or the immune system as besieged city? Something ...”