“... tiny gentlemanly elite was extremely important in sustaining the personally not very confident young Day-Lewis as he took his first steps towards his chosen career of being ‘a poet’. The most important thing Day-Lewis did at Oxford was to meet Auden, three years his junior but already behaving like a fully-ordained hierophant. Together they edited ...”

“... a right to give laws to Americans. When the Clinton impeachment was going forward, Obama was a young Chicago politician with other things on his mind. He could have learned something then about how the Republicans work. The most questionable of his appeals in the primary campaign against Hillary Clinton was the endlessly repeated bromide with which he ...”

“... he adopts a tone of brittle comedy, perhaps approximating to the artificial high spirits of young men about to enter a war zone: In the canteen at lunch today, in the maze of Great Cumberland Street where their mission was headquartered, the role of creamed kidneys had been played by something called neeps, seethed in a cornstarch slurry. ‘Best neeps ...”

“... a Labour leader, when fighting to win a general election?’ ITV’s excitable political editor, Robert Peston, asked the same day. It was bracing stuff, and if you’re sympathetic (perhaps even if you aren’t; Brexit and Trump are at the back of everyone’s minds, after all), it makes you sit up and wonder, however fleetingly: could he do it?In ...”

“... who executed fifty prisoners by blowing them from guns after the Kuka outbreak in 1872. Sir Robert Davies, O’Dwyer’s predecessor as lieutenant governor of Punjab, defended Cowan wholeheartedly: ‘Blowing from a gun is an impressive and merciful manner of execution, well calculated to strike terror into the bystanders.’ Mountstuart ...”

“... were quite often written down. In the 1320 Declaration of Arbroath, the Scottish nobles warn King Robert that if he should let them down and ‘yield Scotland or us to the English king or people’, they will dethrone him and choose another. ‘We who are as good as you swear to you who are no better than us to accept you as our king,’ the Aragonese ...”

“... tracking one down to the Colorado desert, where he was approached by a member of the crew, a young man of ‘Nordic’ appearance, wearing what appeared to be ski pants. He had soft, unblemished skin, long, flowing hair and sparkling white teeth. Communicating telepathically, he explained that his name was Orthon, that he came from Venus, and that he was ...”

“... by Matthew Paris, the monk of St Albans. Any biographer is spoiled for choice among the sources: Robert of Gloucester, Roger of Wendover, Thomas Wykes of Osney, Alderman fitzThedmar of London – all of them salty and unrestrained in their comments, whether on the uselessness of Henry as a war leader or the brutality of Simon de Montfort’s massacre of the ...”

“... a six-note glockenspiel in its rump including miniature bells and hammers. The rest are secular: young women holding lutes, citterns and mandolins. An account of one of these players by the art historian Fritz Saxl from 1936 describes the way it moves with ‘a combination of stateliness and grace … The feet move slowly, the figure seems to float. The ...”

“... cycle is deeply antisocial. Octopuses live solitary lives in single dens and die soon after their young hatch. Many male octopuses, to avoid being eaten during mating, will keep their bodies as far removed from the female as possible, extending a single arm with a sperm packet towards her siphon, a manoeuvre known as ‘the reach’. Just how clever are ...”

“... of Orson Welles in Touch of Evil. Southmere Lakeside and the soothing water features contrived by Robert Rigg as part of a GLC initiative in the 1960s had turned sour by the time of Stanley Kubrick’s film of A Clockwork Orange in 1971. Dystopian violence overcame the innocence of Corbusier-influenced architects and planners hoping for a brutalist iteration ...”

“... decided he didn’t like standing out in the cold? His first biographer (and former student), Robert Emmons, insisted that ‘SICKERT IS ONE OF THE IMPRESSIONISTS’ on the grounds that, though not an original member, he was ‘so closely allied to them both in method and sentiment, as to take his place, naturally and inevitably, within the innermost ...”

“... Boothby: ‘Why did you ever wake me? I never want to see any of my family again.’ She had four young children at the time. Years later, Boothby described her as ‘on the whole, the most selfish and possessive woman I have ever known’. She did not get what she wanted. Macmillan’s solicitor Philip Frere pointed out that divorce would be fatal for his ...”

“... anti-communist line held against fashionable opinion in the 1960s and after by Kingsley Amis and Robert Conquest. It also contains a letter from Amis to Christopher Hitchens, which is needling enough (‘Do you admire terror? I know you admire freedom’) in the rhetorical pressure it applies on an old friend to renounce Lenin, Trotsky and all their ...”