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“... Apps describes Bevin as ‘the man who would strike the initial spark that started Nato’ and who took the ‘first faltering steps’ towards its creation. But however long you pick over Bevin’s correspondence with George Marshall and Arthur Vandenberg in search of British genius, the story doesn’t fit. Secret meetings between the US, UK and Canada to ...”

“... RAF Fighter Command, and invited witnesses such as Stephen Darbishire, a schoolboy who in 1954 took photos of a UFO in Cumbria, to meet him at Buckingham Palace. He also amassed a large collection of books on the subject. Towards the end of his life, he read The Halt Perspective (2016), about the Rendlesham Forest incident of 1980, when several UFOs were ...”

“... claimed to reporters that the recovered ‘sarin’ was merely ‘anti-freeze’. The DIA paper took the arrests as evidence that al-Nusra was expanding its access to chemical weapons. It said Qassab had ‘self-identified’ as a member of al-Nusra, and that he was directly connected to Abd-al-Ghani, the ‘ANF emir for military manufacturing’. Qassab ...”

“... Antrim (1901), a collection of slightly fey dialect poems, was much praised by the poet laureate, John Masefield, and set to music by the Irish composers Charles Villiers Stanford and Hamilton Harty. They were Edwardian popular songs of the sort that Bartell D’Arcy might have been asked to sing in ‘The Dead’, when he wasn’t having a go at ‘The Lass ...”

“... car to skid off the road and flip over, killing Metzger as well as himself. (Kligman survived and took up with Willem de Kooning.)Undeterred, Greenberg went on to steer more of his protégés to the Sullivan Institute. It soon became almost obligatory for artists seeking his approval to get a Sullivanian therapist: ‘There was pressure,’ the sculptor James ...”

“... garden his queasied voice squeezed like verjuice as he named the place and his black gown took the green shade of dried ink. I was chough, then, to his raven, an unequal match – nothing to boast of – between dark friends who’ve started to share the used rub of each other’s fixed and hardened edges. Now the smell of box and spicy bark is a ...”

“... It’s called A Gentle Occupation.’ She placed it carefully on the coffee-table before her, took up her glass and drained it. ‘Lunch is at one. Punctually. Do you like my hair?’ ... A man at the table beside us finished his meal, pushed himself up with the aid of a white stick, adjusted a green plastic eye-shade over his fore-head, and inched from ...”

“... for educational levels) was 50 per cent higher than elsewhere, and executives of financial firms took home two and a half times what their counterparts earned in other sectors. Some areas of finance have cartel-like features, including high barriers to the entry of potential competitors. Where retail banking, say, has seen some recent new entrants, creating ...”

“... novel about the content of these pictures. One showing a donor looking at a representation of St John baptising Christ is not very different in its basic theme from a painting by Titian half a century earlier. Donors were included, as they always had been, in order to invite the spectator to remember them when praying before the image. As the innkeeper in ...”

“... a seminary, first for Catholics and then for Anglicans. Although the fellowship included John Foxe, whose Actes and Monuments (1563) was, for several centuries, the bestselling English book after the Bible, there were few scholars of note. But then the purpose of Oxbridge colleges in the 16th and 17th centuries ‘was to impart knowledge, not to ...”

“... Knossos, Italian violins, paintings from Uccello to Gainsborough, intricate dead clocks. Like Sir John Soane’s Museum in London, the Ashmolean was its own exhibit: a museum to display an essentially 18th-century collectors’ museum. That’s all gone. Behind the mighty old façade, the new design is more like MoMA in Manhattan. Piranesi with the lights ...”

“... In September 2004, the German sculptor John Bock turned the main gallery at the ICA into something like a giant treehouse, a cluster of cabins, platforms and dens bashed together out of plywood and hung about with tinfoil, blankets and washing-lines. To get between them you’d climb ladders and squeeze through tunnels, balance on walkways and clamber over hay bales ...”

“... in the rock-leaved Bible of geology’. Those were the words of the pioneering geologist John Wesley Powell, who led the first expedition through the Grand Canyon in 1873. Thomas Moran, an experienced painter from Philadelphia, travelled with Powell, and had been to Wyoming and Montana with the US Geological and Geographical Survey two years ...”

“... South is too parodic to be true, and too true to be only a parody. His earlier work Erasure (2001) took us to the same territory, although not so far south, and with more precarious modes of balance. Some of the comedy was transformed into straight horror and many of the horrors were not parodic in the least. They were all the more desolate for being so ...”

“... condemned to a slow death by waning British commitment. It was around this time that an encounter took place between two outlooks almost equally marginal to the spirit of the times in Britain. Arthur C. Clarke, by now a well-established science fiction writer as well as the author of the pioneering paper on satellite communications, had been growing ...”