“... celebrity Axel Munthe. His extraordinary memoir, The Story of San Michele, was published by John Murray in 1929, when Munthe was 72. The first edition rapidly sold out; it went into its 20th impression in January 1931, and has been in print ever since.* The reasons for its wide and enduring appeal have to do partly with its subject-matter – Munthe led ...”

“... that his near invisibility sustained his authority and he never sought the limelight, but as John Macnicol points out in a brief but sharp entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, for two decades his word was, almost literally, law: ‘In the interwar years no policy proposal could proceed to legislation without the actuary’s ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... an expression of Britain’s shifting ‘governing traditions’. Both quote from the memoirs of John Robert Clynes, Labour leader between 1921 and 1922 and lord privy seal in 1924. Reflecting on meeting George V, Clynes could ‘not help marvelling at the strange turn of Fortune’s wheel’ that had brought him and his colleagues ‘to this pinnacle beside ...”

“... bitcoin-related initiatives. One result is a great deal of confusion. Bitcoin was apparently a major topic of conversation at Davos this year, where there was evidently much blurring between bitcoin the currency, bitcoin the technology, cryptocurrency in general, the blockchain as in bitcoin, or the blockchain as in blockchains in general. The headline ...”

“... ground lies two generations before the waverings of first Mansfield and then Stowell, when Sir John Holt said all that the law could say about personal freedom, qualified in its territorial reach but handsomely unqualified by race or religion, until such time as Parliament was prepared to follow suit in the colonies. The courts cannot claim a consistent ...”

“... in Syria. Last April, after an optimistic assessment of rebel progress by the secretary of state, John Kerry, in front of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Dempsey told the Senate Armed Services Committee that ‘there’s a risk that this conflict has become stalemated.’ Dempsey’s initial view after 21 August was that a US strike on Syria – under ...”

“... than Greene, and Richey in his late forties. Steegmuller – who had by then published several major biographies (Flaubert, Maupassant, Apollinaire), but was best known as a translator of Flaubert – had met Greene years before in America, when he was still with his first wife. Hazzard would go on to write a clutch of spiky, ambitious novels including The ...”

“... impossible to recycle it all. Clapp tells the story of Ghana’s development in the 2000s into a major destination for Western e-waste – discarded smartphones, laptops, printers and the like. Its government had networked the country, believing that the internet held the key to future prosperity, but most Ghanaian households weren’t in a position to buy ...”

“... in this editor’s judgment, is the most considerable poet in English since the major Romantics, surpassing his great contemporary rival Tennyson, and the principal 20th-century poets, including even Yeats, Hardy and Wallace Stevens, let alone the various fashionable Modernists whose reputations are now rightly in rapid decline.’Such an ...”

“... the help he got from Gamlin. Forbes wrote to him at the BBC – at the time Forbes’s name was John Theobald Clarke – and Gamlin wrote back, telling Forbes that his letter was so extraordinary he would have to meet him. When they met Gamlin said it would be necessary for him to change his name. ‘Another young actor, ahead of me,’ Forbes wrote years ...”

“... wall in King’s Cross Station. Anna’s father reckoned that the Hadmans were related to the poet John Clare, who came from Helpston, a village near their own. Our investigation drew many previously unknown Hadmans from the ground where they had lain, undisturbed, for hundreds of years. They were known to each other, some of them, but unknown to us: lives ...”

“... the only reason he was feeling better, however. On holiday in Corsica with his Harvard friend John Edsall in spring 1926, he took to reading Proust, and fastened on a passage from A la recherche that released him from his feelings of self-contempt by acknowledging the pervasiveness of human moral frailty – especially the ‘indifference to the ...”

“... enthusiasms of a slightly older painter friend called Tom Phillips: the mind-expanding work of John Cage and Cornelius Cardew was followed by Morton Feldman and La Monte Young, Steve Reich and Terry Riley. Phillips also alerted Eno to the untapped potential of tape recorders, and impressed him with a lecture using random cards and slides.All these things ...”

“... like the whiff of cordite long after the gun has been fired. When I mention this to David Cornwell/John le Carré, he says: ‘I can still feel it in my nostrils now.’ Historians, like spooks, need a sensitive nose, Orwell’s ‘Sniff, sniff’ for the detection of ‘all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls’.3 (And, in ...”