“... Kremlin connections. In May, Papadopoulos got drunk at a London wine bar and told the story to Alexander Downer, former leader of the Australian Liberal Party and then high commissioner to the UK. In June, Donald Trump Jr, Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort held a secret meeting with Russians at Trump Tower. In July, after the hacking of the Democratic ...”

“... April 2016, 978 0 241 96366 1)The Brontës: A Life in Letters by Juliet Barker (Little, Brown, 464 pp., £25, April 2016, 978 1 4087 0831 6)Outsiders: Five Women Writers Who Changed the World by Lyndall Gordon (Virago, 325 pp., £20, October, 978 0 349 00633 8)Take Courage: Anne Brontë and the Art of Life by Samantha Ellis (Chatto & Windus, 343 ...”

“... in 16th-century portraits; or perhaps a younger – and far slighter – version of Veronese’s Alexander receiving the children of Darius after the battle of Issus: with the same high forehead and suggestion of hair thinning a bit at the temples. His features certainly seemed to belong to that epoch of painting: the faces in Elizabethan ...”

“... a tailored jacket and jeans, with a blue-edged pocket square in his breast pocket, a scarf and brown brogue boots. He was 47 but looked about 29. There was something studied about him – the Alexander McQueen scarf, the lawyerly punctilio – and I’d never met anyone who spoke so easily about such large sums of ...”