“... an undercover psychological warfare unit working closely with MI6, Wallace was put in charge of black propaganda operations. These consisted in feeding a host of alarmist stories about the IRA to the British press – wading through them, one begins to wonder, glumly, how far one can trust anything the British press writes about Ireland. In 1972 Harold ...”

“... Hurricane Bird; Gaviota Oscura; Gaviota Monja; Oiseau Fou; Touaou. But when the keen birdwatcher Ian Fleming needed a name that sounded as ordinary as possible, he had to look no further than the title page of Bond’s great work. Why does the name of an actual ornithologist sound so right as the name of a fictional spy? Why couldn’t Fleming have used ...”

“... German film – beautiful and extravagant and fantastic, and nevertheless go against the grain.’ Ian Penman’s Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors is in large part a book about dreams, and about interrupting them. Fassbinder belonged to a generation of left-wing artists, musicians and filmmakers whose aim was to shake their audience out of a slumber. You ...”

“... of fascinating problems, mostly unsolved’, they have been chary of taking up this challenge. Ian Mortimer’s The Fears of Henry IV fills an important gap, and if it does not solve all the problems it certainly tackles most of them. In the years before 1397, Henry won a large reputation: as his father’s dutiful son, as a champion of chivalry and a ...”

“... were published with two sets of covers to fit the self-images of two overlapping readerships, Ian McEwan’s The Daydreamer, marketed domestically as a children’s book, could be published in Italian translation as for adults. The Young Adult label has a faintly disparaging though illogical overtone (would anyone want to be described as an old ...”

“... explained in a column for the South African Mail and Guardian, of turning him into ‘an Angry Black Man’. He describes a party in New York that Kapuściński, in town for a PEN conference, was supposed to attend where he waited for the chance to confront him. When Kapuściński failed to arrive, Wainaina downed a consolation martini and approached ...”

“... of Sir Derek Ezra, supreme servant and subtle bureaucrat of consensus, and that of Sir Ian MacGregor, vieux terrible of confrontation. ‘There is either too much or too little.’ Not since 1913, in fact, have the figures seemed roughly right. Coal had been ancillary, rather than essential, to Britain’s early Industrial Revolution. Demand had ...”

“... with us, above all the hymns of the Victorian and what one might call the long Edwardian age. Ian Bradley’s study is fascinating, once past a misguided Introduction, which develops a long comparison between Victorian hymns and modern soap-operas that seems to embarrass Bradley himself halfway through. He is a mine of information not only on the ...”

“... sacred duty’.In December 1918 Reilly and Hill got themselves sent by the SIS to the northern Black Sea coast. It took them two weeks to travel from London to Odesa via Paris, Marseille, Malta, Istanbul and Sevastopol. ‘The situation in southern Russia in December 1918,’ Morris writes, ‘was infinitely complicated … Following the defeat of the ...”

“... Sade. My phone never stops ringing; it is my Beethoven, speaking into it is oral sex, my shining black cock. I press buttons, phone up New York every evening, find out how the markets close, and sometimes, when Eduardo goes down on me, I wrap the cord around his neck until he begs me for mercy.’ Kate Pullinger is altogether more low-key and sequential, and ...”

“... that took shape at the end of ration book austerity. As if bringing new definition to the drained black-and-white photographs of the era, Burn re-creates these pivotal years through a detailed inventory of period clothes, period decor, even period simlies (‘they twanged like tram wires, boiled and bubbled like kitchen geysers’), trawling the sleazy ...”

“... Bill Deedes is justly celebrated as a nice man and an English archetype, the sort of character Ian Carmichael used to play in Ealing comedies: Woosterish, emollient, never standing on his rank, always accepting Tory family values – usually expressed more forcefully by a fearsome, chauffeur-driven auntie figure, as played by Margaret Rutherford, or, in Deedes’s own life, by Margaret Thatcher ...”

“... have tried bravely to give us an insight into those problems which astronomers now find exciting: black holes, quasars, pulsars, general relativity. The celestial world is a good resource for such works: we can rely on the amazement conjured into being by contemplation of the heavens. Comets, however, seem to raise a few problems. For modern astronomy, we are ...”

“... one point he describes the present Queen Mother as ‘blessed with typically Celtic good looks: black hair, blue eyes and a skin like cream’, when any modern student of the subject could have begun the sentence in the same way and gone on with: ‘gingery pube-like rug, yellowish eyes and a hide like a pizza’.) But he is a writer of the pre-daylight ...”

“... in the wings: Richard Hell, Iggy Pop, the Ramones. It really was, as the old cliché has it, that black and white. There was no commando unit of primpy stylists for Smith in 1975 – just her, Mapplethorpe and (as related in her 2010 memoir, Just Kids) a few quick shots one afternoon as the New York sun began to dip. One of the reasons the resulting image was ...”