“... 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 ...”

“... Naples; and a decade since the first Aids fiction started to show up: Robert Ferro’s Second Son, David B. Feinberg’s Eighty-Sixed, Allen Barnett’s beautiful The Body and Its Dangers. Today, as a result of political pressure as well as recognition of a growing gay readership, gay sections can be found in most bookshop chains, and independent gay ...”

“... that they could not be Borked. Stealth has its own dangers. Bush thought he had a neo-con in David Souter, but he had been misinformed. He did a better job the next time. Clarence Thomas had arrived in Washington at the age of 31, and never left the Beltway thereafter, so his neo-con development could be carefully monitored. At 43, he had put in loyal ...”

“... in April 1586, the Papal Nuncio refers to ‘Giovanni Dee e il zoppo suo compagno’ – zoppo means ‘lame’. It is possible that Kelley was disabled in some way (and disability is traditionally associated with the psychic powers he claimed). There is a reference, during one of the séances, to his difficulty in kneeling. And then there is the question ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... homosexuals: Alexandra in O Pioneers!, Thea in The Song of the Lark, Claude Wheeler and David Gerhardt in One of Ours, Euclide Auclair in Shadows on the Rock, and of course those two priests in Death Comes for the Archbishop. In The Professor’s House we hit pay dirt: according to various commentators, not just Professor St Peter and Tom Outland ...”

“... in our household where their message was taken for gospel, the value of education as a means of rising above one’s circumstances never questioned. So, trailing back from the Picturedrome in that first year of the war, we thought Michael Redgrave and Roddy McDowall were real heroes in whose footsteps my parents hoped my brother and I would one day ...”