“... the princess and the dwarf who is their servant. He himself has adopted a Malay woman and her young son, who falls ill from drinking and bathing in infected water. Billy’s interest is platonic, although the woman is a prostitute. He gives her money to help the child. When a message about an arms’ shipment comes through the military attaché’s ...”

“... condition of minority groups. Between 1974 and 1976 three further volumes emerged from PEP, all by David Smith, though one volume, The Extent of Racial Discrimination, was written in collaboration with Neil McIntosh. The first volume was published in June 1974, six years after the passage of the second Race Relations Act. It looked at racial disadvantage among ...”

“... Camelot for which its long history as a chosen land had been a preparation. This was a President, young, manly, determined and vigorous, who would work miracles. With the sons of Harvard and Yale at his feet, historians and intellectuals his companions and advisers, he would never negotiate out of fear, even at the risk of nuclear war, and never fear to ...”

“... but out of a piece of inaccurate gossip. The Goldsmith case, though presented in the usual David-and-Goliath terms, in fact confirmed the established strength of the Eye: Goldsmith, who hadn’t been much in the public view since his elopement with Isabel Patino, ran headfirst into the magazine’s rare power to make its opponents first notorious, then ...”

“... saw a poster facing me. Executed in yellow and black, it was a combined logo featuring the Star of David, the Islamic star and crescent, the Roman Catholic cross and the more elaborate cruciform of the Serbian and Bosnian Orthodox. Gens una summus,read the superscription. ‘We are one people’. Here, rendered in iconographic terms, was the defiant remnant of ...”

“... a ramshackle household in St John’s Wood. Elizabeth Jane Howard, who knew them all when she was young and later wove them into her Cazalet novels, described the Craxtons as exuding happiness like pollen, which rubbed off. The pianist Harold Isaacs remembered overcrowded Acomb Lodge as ‘a very strange house’, adding enigmatically: ‘Essie knitted ...”

“... owned by Alfonso of Aragon, though it is debatable whether it would have been accessible to the young Antonello. Even if he didn’t see it first-hand, he may nevertheless have responded to the panel showing St Jerome in his study: a St Jerome by Colantonio, painted in the mid-1440s, is almost a mirror image of Van Eyck’s surviving example of the ...”

“... Baltimore has been to crime what 19th-century London was to poverty. This is due in large part to David Simon, once a Baltimore Sun reporter himself, whose books Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets and The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner City Neighbourhood (written with Ed Burns) were both turned into TV programmes, and fed into his most successful ...”

“... for a moment unnoticed, out of sight, out of earshot, and truly alone?’ Katherine Verdery was a young, high-spirited American when she arrived in Romania in 1973, a Stanford postgraduate intending to research an anthropology thesis on Romanian village life. She came as a bit of a leftie, 1968 vintage, inclined to mock the superstitious anti-communism ...”

“... about the hard work of AA that has the pain of truthfulness about it. As Rilke said to his young poet, if you want to know the right course of action, just ask yourself: what is the hardest thing to do? It’s not a hurricane lantern, but in this dark and windy land, it might be a better candle than most. About 40 days in, I found myself growing more ...”

“... of one of the most compelling documents a historian can hold – the love letter. Mary Hewitt, the young wife of a Coventry lawyer, kissed his letters when he was away and invited him to imagine her a Woman of Feeling languishing for want of him: post days are all sunshine when we are to have a letter [in the] morning … I find a secrett pleasure ye night ...”

“... of old age are likely to be dead or very tired or just reluctant to discuss the matter with clever young interlocutors.’ ‘Have had’ is quite marvellous, and Kermode acknowledges without irony that ‘much of the best thinking on this subject comes from philosophically sophisticated but honourably ignorant juniors.’ There was Plato, for instance; and ...”

“... that suited her best. Johnson was soon the star attraction of a circle that included Edmund Burke, David Garrick, Oliver Goldsmith, Frances Burney and Joshua Reynolds, whose portraits of the group adorned the walls of the library in Streatham. Hester presided with remarkable wit, vivacity and in Burney’s neologism, ‘agreeability’; in both contemporary ...”

“... perfectly in the Soviet context. Peter and the Wolf, composed to a libretto featuring Soviet Young Pioneers written by Prokofiev himself, was one of the great successes of his early Moscow years; his music for Eisenstein’s film Alexander Nevsky was another. On other occasions his sincere attempts to fit the requirements of his patrons worked less ...”

“... income. Responding to the increasingly prevalent view that Britain had a serious mobility problem, David Cameron’s coalition government rebranded Labour’s Child Poverty Commission as the Social Mobility Commission, with Alan Milburn as its head. Milburn gave a lot of attention to recruitment to elite positions – his flagship report was on fair access to ...”