“... Corso kitted himself out in a traffic-stopping zoot suit, squeezed $7000 into his pockets and took off for Florida. Later he would write about how money leaked away, slippery as mercury: ‘Money in every pocket, no wallet, no clip/I just bunch it up and stuff it.’ Cash for Corso was always a dangerously occult commodity. ‘Money,’ he ...”

“... now just for Macmillan. In time, the Aubrey-Maturin books became a cult property. Iris Murdoch and John Bayley were fans, and every now and then a laudatory notice would appear in the TLS or the LRB, for which O’Brian wrote in the 1980s and 1990s.*His life began to change in 1989. Starling Lawrence, an editor at W.W. Norton, read a borrowed paperback of the ...”

“... among other things, as an assault on an insular version of Ireland. The pogrom in Limerick, which took place in 1904, was incited by the fiery preaching of Father John Creagh to the arch-confraternity: The Jews came to Limerick apparently the most miserable tribe imaginable ... but now they had enriched themselves and ...”

“... was out there, waiting to suck me in and forever control my destiny – but only if I let it. I took positive control over my life. There was a point not long ago when Dave Pelzer’s self-rescue manuals held the top three spots in the bestseller charts. In Britain, it is likely that one out of every 15 adults will have read a Pelzer book, and the ...”

“... Venables; Alan Tierney, a Surrey police constable who was paid £1250 for passing information that John Terry’s mother had been cautioned for shoplifting, and Ronnie Wood for assaulting his girlfriend; and Tracy Bell, a pharmacy assistant at Sandhurst, who had sold five stories about Princes William and Harry in 2005 and 2006 for around £1000. The arrests ...”

“... On 1 February 1968 Eddie Adams took a photograph of the South Vietnamese chief of police standing in the street and shooting a Vietcong suspect in the head. The picture is listed on the web as one of the ‘100 photos that changed the world’. For years I thought that it recorded the blood spurting out of the side of the man’s head as the bullet went into his temple ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in the house on which to practise my newly acquired skill. My parents were both readers and Dad took the periodical John Bull, the books they generally favoured literature of escape, tales of ordinary folk like themselves who had thrown it all up for a life of mild adventure, a smallholding on the Wolds, say, or an island ...”

“... be shipped to Edmonton was transported to landfill sites in Essex and Huntingdon. Convoys took advantage of the M25, which increasingly functioned as an asteroid belt for London’s rubble, the unwanted mess of the building boom, the destruction of tower blocks, the frenzied creation of loft-living units along every waterway. We’re intrigued by ...”

“... supporter of the Independent Labour Party, bent on expropriation of his own class, Percy Taylor took a Robin Hood view of politics. His party trick was to stand on his head, literally, for the benefit of his nephews and nieces, since they collected the money that cascaded out of his pockets. The watchful eye of his wife Connie meanwhile ensured that all ...”

“... circus, a veil over anthropology after Frazer, and you sense his approval that Cambridge took its time before climbing on the sociology bandwagon (no reference to the work of W.G. Runciman). Odd, too, that Appleton and Aston are missing from the roll-call of the Cavendish. Still, there is only one staggering omission. He describes the genesis of ...”

“... No prominent Bolshevik leader supported his call to revolution, and the editorial board of Pravda took the extraordinary step of dissociating themselves and the Party from Lenin’s proposals. Bogdanov characterised the ‘April Theses’ as ‘the delirium of a madman’; Nadezhda Krupskaya concluded: ‘I am afraid it looks as if Lenin has gone ...”

“... 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 ...”