“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... part of the reason lies in its recent political history. Since the Sixties, there have been four major dramas in Latin America that have caught the attention of the world. Three of these were either by-passed or aborted, and the other took a peculiar form, in Brazil. Internationally, the continent became news for the first time in the wake of the Cuban ...”

“... authorship must surely have been collective, the planning long-term and meticulous. The killing of John F. Kennedy in Dallas in 1963, or the destruction of the Twin Towers in New York in 2001, are the two major vortices into which conspiracy theorists have been sucked in our own time, generating ever more elaborate ...”

“... in those areas, as well as the West Bank and Gaza. Finally, through her Lebanese puppet, Major Haddad, she occupies a small enclave in Southern Lebanon, having laid waste the surrounding country. The principle of Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories has been accepted by virtually the whole world. Yet Israel has withdrawn only from the ...”

“... enter Gaza to 34 – flour but not yeast, sugar but not coffee or tea. (‘Pasta,’ a querulous John Kerry asked senior Israeli officials after visiting Gaza, ‘what’s wrong with pasta?’) The shortages were biting, particularly after Israel destroyed or damaged tens of thousands of homes, schools and government buildings in its 22-day campaign last ...”

“... false belief about pirates and slave-traders. When Britain in 1807, the US in 1808 and the major European powers at the Congress of Vienna in 1815 banned the transportation of slaves by sea, slaving became assimilated in international law to piracy, a capital offence. In the seaman’s ballad ‘The Flying Cloud’, dating from the 1830s, the narrator ...”

“... drew and painted Bachardy and Isherwood, sitting side by side together in that house), is a major contemporary artist. It is a retrospective of his early drawings (in black and white) and later paintings (in colour) of various movie stars, film directors, screenwriters, cinematographers, costumiers, choreographers, composers, columnists, producers and ...”

“... Sir Thomas is buried in St Helen’s, Bishopsgate, a church that survived both of London’s major conflagrations only to be severely damaged in the 1990s by IRA bombs. But the Greshams’ legacy – Britain’s global wealth and the city’s primacy in international finance – remains visible and vital. The greatest alteration in London’s fortunes ...”