“... energy, old prophecies fulfilled: its millenarian ideology included plenty that appealed to young men of a certain type. Sweeping across Upper Mesopotamia, its fighters summoned up memories in the European mind of Timur and the Golden Horde. But these weren’t primitive rebels. They came – echoing American claims in Iraq – as builders of a ...”

“... being British’. Hosking knew that they already had a reputation for being ‘unusually intrepid young women’ in this huge country with its ‘very small white population’. Hosking felt that the white European men in Africa admired the women’s ‘spirit’ and their working so far from home and always seemed ‘delighted’ to be asked to drive them ...”

“... surprisingly long time, but when scandal finally came in 1996 – a currency trader called Robert Young, working in cahoots with Cantrade Bank, a Jersey subsidiary of the Swiss banking giant UBS, defrauded investors of $26 million – the Wall Street Journal concluded that Jersey was an offshore hazard ‘living off lax regulation and political ...”

“... at teatime; they’re also hampered by the comic Constable Bang. Only Beate Moerk, an attractive young inspector, seems to make any progress, but when she’s kidnapped by ‘the Axeman’, her colleagues respond with further inactivity. The novel is set in an imaginary, unnamed country – the kind of place where the police can squeeze a difficult witness ...”

“... cause of poverty is poverty. The impoverished are more likely to be unemployed, to be ill, to die young, to have illegitimate children, to be violent, to thieve, to be semi-literate, to be heroin addicts, primarily because they are poor. A social welfare policy which simply gave the poor large amounts of money would be more efficacious than anything we do at ...”

“... for the economic inefficiencies to which it gave rise, but also for the way in which it subjected young people to the whims of a master. Smith, Rothschild reminds us, was an enemy of privilege, who, in the sixth edition of the Theory of Moral Sentiments (published in 1790), inserted a passage lamenting the corrupting effects of our disposition to worship the ...”

“... was Max, from the other side of the family, who dominated it. It was natural for Max to offer the young Siegmund, who showed a precocious intellect, a career at the firm to restore the intra-family balance. But Siegmund’s initial appreciation of Uncle Max’s support soured, turning first into resentment at Max’s favouritism towards his charming but less ...”

“... Queen Incog’ in this rough and tumble burlesque, and according to her first biographer David Baker, who wrote eight years after her death in 1756, she ‘appears to have had a relation of close literary intimacy’ with the feckless Hatchett. But that’s as warm as the paternity trail ever gets. It doesn’t help, as Baker also recorded, that ...”

“... Larkin’s closeted artiness to Amis’s knockabout style. Sometimes, as when he writes of the young Amis being viewed as ‘almost charismatic’, apparent bitchiness turns out to be a side effect of an awkward way with words. Elsewhere he seems as appalled as any taste-shaping puritan by Amis’s boozing and shagging. And after a while it’s hard not to ...”

“... inside and outside Madison Square Garden, eclipsing Paul Robeson and Dean Acheson. An awestruck young Alistair Cooke reported in the Guardian that ‘he looks like a divinity and he looks like the portrait on every dollar bill.’ The resemblance to George Washington is undeniable, although there is a creepy hint of Alastair Sim too. Never one to ...”

“... assassinations. On 4 May a man with explosives attached to his body blew himself up in a queue of young men trying to join the police in Arbil, killing 60 of them and wounding 150. Ghassan Attiyah, a political commentator in Baghdad, told me that ‘the Kurds were able to destabilise Iraq for half a century under Saddam Hussein and his predecessors. The Sunni ...”

“... herself marooned on a desert island with a slave whom she despises but is wholly reliant on’. David Dabydeen, whose 1987 book, Hogarth’s Blacks, was a study of ‘Images of Blacks in 18th-Century English Art’, based his novel A Harlot’s Progress (1999) on a startled black servant in one of Hogarth’s illustrations for The Harlot’s Progress. He ...”

“... friend and protégé of Robert Capa, who works for the Magnum agency, and has disappeared. A young man, our narrator, meets Jansen (‘when I was 19’) and offers to sort and catalogue his work. Jansen is friendly, but aloof, distracted, avoiding all his old friends, not answering the telephone, hiding from visitors. He is plainly living in the ...”

“... unbreakable spirit to win! Fighting the Hun with pepper? Was that something that Jimmy Perry and David Croft, the fecund scriptwriters of Dad’s Army, dreamed up in a dizzy moment? Not so. Charles Graves, an early historian of the Home Guard, refers to a unit which suggested in orders that any rudimentary weapons ‘could be usefully supplemented by a ...”

“... are a proper visible expression of forces at work on the structure. The final result, according to David Newland, technical adviser to the bridge’s funding body, is ‘probably the most complex passively-damped structure in the world’. (In an actively-damped system an input of energy is required to answer the force with a counterforce; in a passive ...”