“... Chatterton. Henson agreed to get in touch with his London bookseller, but claimed the only viable means of publication would be by subscription. In order to get up a subscription list, there would have to be a prospectus with a specimen of Clare’s poetry. To print three hundred copies of the proposal, Henson would charge a pound. By working day and night at ...”

“... development conjured from the Bryant & May match factory, the weaver’s garret occupied by David Rodinsky above a decommissioned synagogue in Princelet Street, and the first speculative (and doomed) ‘Montmartre meets Montserrat’ restaurant on Dalston Lane. Wright managed to get an entire book out of a few hundred yards of old degraded Hackney ...”

“... island – the freest and fairest in Singaporean history – which made the Labour Front leader, David Marshall, head of the local advisory board of what remained a British colony. The son of Sephardic Baghdadis, Marshall had been a Japanese POW in the mines of Hokkaido, and had Fabian connections in London. He proposed the creation of a welfare state and ...”

“... that … female? We know about the tragic loss of her son, Charles, at the age of eleven, which means that she exists for us in grief, as a permanent mother. There is nothing so diminishing, to the canonical view, though anyone who has witnessed this sort of loss first-hand knows that it puts you among the Greeks, into Shakespeare. ‘I have spent most of ...”

“... raced to meet the expectations of their followers. (Unlike most governments, as the historian David Renton points out, the fascist parties in Italy and Germany became more radical once in office.) Fascism involves a form of collective behaviour that seems unaccountable. Many in the interwar period were slow to recognise the danger it posed, seeing fascism ...”

“... of white women.’Black feminists weren’t the only ones to take offence. In 1986 the novelist David Bradley confessed that the first time he read Native Son,I shed no tears for Bigger. I wanted him dead; by legal means if possible, by lynching if necessary … I did not see Bigger Thomas as a symbol of any kind of black ...”

“... a truer picture would emerge: of her doing and her desiring at the same time. It would create, as David Trinidad is quoted as saying in Peter Steinberg’s introduction, ‘a movie of her life’. Still, in the end, we must take a point of view. The penultimate line of the chronology reads: ‘11 February 1963: Protects children then dies by suicide.’ It is ...”

“... On​ 18 June, the sixth day of Israel’s attack on Iran, David Petraeus gave some unsolicited advice to Donald Trump in an interview with the New York Times. Trump, he said, should deliver an ultimatum to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, ordering him to dismantle Iran’s uranium enrichment programme or face ‘the complete destruction of your country and your regime and your people ...”

“... if they don’t believe it. If they don’t report it, they can be prosecuted themselves. This means that any therapy dealing with hitherto undisclosed abuse must also become a forensic investigation. A recent British Psychological Society report gives the results of a survey on the topic of recovered memories. It was carried out among 810 chartered ...”

“... Some murders – and some murderers – seem to disrupt that order more than others. McFeely cites David Baldus’s massive 1985 study of almost 2500 cases prosecuted in Georgia in the 1970s, which showed some remarkable, if scarcely surprising, racial disparities. If the victim was white the death sentence was far more likely to be imposed than if the victim ...”

“... force of attraction of the new Baltic republics for the Russians living in them. Although by no means always enjoying full citizenship, and inevitably the object of residual suspicion or prejudice, Russians in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, as every poll made clear, appreciated the kind of life they could lead there, not a few having voted for independence ...”

“... Sir John Sunderland, Roger Carr, Rick Braddock, Ellen Marram, Guy Elliott, Rosemary Thorne, David Thompson, Sanjiv Ahuja, Wolfgang Berndt, Lord Patten and Raymond Viault. Only Berndt replied (Chris Patten’s assistant told me he was in ‘rural Asia’ without email, then, when the deadline was extended, too ill to respond). Berndt told me he ...”

“... always the same, ‘Infisal, Infisal, Infisal’, before passing them to a third official. Infisal means ‘separation’ in Arabic. The ‘infisal’ ballots are counted into bundles of 50 and then rolled up with a rubber band; it is not yet even eight o’clock and there are already 26 bundles on the table, while there aren’t yet enough slips in the other ...”

“... By ‘see you later’ she’d meant she’d see him another day, but in Italy the phrase usually means later that night. When she told her interrogators she’d merely used the wrong phrase, her interpreter, she says, called her a liar. They suggested she’d left Sollecito’s flat and gone to meet Lumumba, and that she was ‘traumatised’ so couldn’t ...”

“... a young man were to be heightened by the ‘drive against male vice’ initiated in 1954 under David Maxwell Fyfe as home secretary, whose most notable victim was Lord Montagu, imprisoned for 12 months for homosexual offences. On the Tube, Forster closely observes an ‘enormous young foreigner’. Was he perhaps ‘a Cossack dancer? I would have asked ...”