“... Aller, the brilliant scholar of China who was one of the chief ornaments of that address, later took his despair and disillusion to the length of self-slaughter. Most were more sanguine. I don’t especially remember Bill Clinton, perhaps because he was one of the more moderate and conciliatory types. But I remember several of his girlfriends and I remember ...”

“... but as home secretary he came into his own.One of Sidmouth’s spies, a man called John Castle, was on the action committee responsible for organising the huge and supposedly peaceful meeting of reformers on Spa Fields that was to be addressed by the mellifluous Orator Hunt. Castle tirelessly whipped up the labourers who had just been laid off ...”

“... of custom and prejudice, led some men and women into a clandestine second existence where they took on roles proscribed by the conformism around them. There they indulged the pleasures of the flesh, preached hedonism, and engaged in extortion, crime and subversion – all the while planning to obtain forgiveness for their sins by way of last-minute ...”

“... at three in the morning.’ He doesn’t show much sympathy for the victims either: ‘They killed John Lennon, so why wouldn’t they kill this loser?’ he shrugs at one point. Mendieta may have a dark sense of humour – he deflects a reporter’s questions by announcing that ‘the victim lost his life because his head got smashed in by a meteor from ...”

“... Ludvig Heinrich briefly became the governor general of the islands of St Croix, St Thomas and St John, moving to the governor’s mansion in Christiansted, the seat of Danish government in the West Indies, but then, in 1788, he resigned and returned with his family to Copenhagen. Emilia Regina travelled with them, and her son followed a couple of years ...”

“... There are​ two portraits Roger Fenton took of himself, separated by only a year, one of them in the exhibition of his photographs of the Crimean War at the Queen’s Gallery in Edinburgh (until 26 November) and the other not. The first, from 1854, seems conventional: we see a Victorian gentleman – hair parted, beard trimmed to cover only the underside of his face, leaving the strong chin to fight its own battles – seated in a chair, his arm resting on a covered table ...”

“... in 1973 in Beijing. In 1996, she left for the US. She studied medicine at the University of Iowa, took her Master’s in immunology, worked as a research scientist, then slipped or skipped sideways and attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she took her MFA. She has published two books of short stories, A Thousand ...”

“... immigration into this country in the Fifties and Sixties drove him into paroxysms of fury. He took the side of the Arabs in the Middle East for the only reason which has never been justified: their antagonists were Jews. He believed that the postwar Tory Party was riddled with treacherous moderates, crypto-Communists and homosexuals. He spent many years ...”

“... and devoted to his two daughters, he alienated wife and children by an air of cold hostility. He took his current work in progress with him on holidays and brooded about it while drinking heavily, and the ‘new start’ to his marriage envisaged when he became a freelance writer, was abandoned within weeks. The new start involved stopping work at ...”

“... hundred years old.’ The college plumbing was also pretty ancient. Ved shivered in his room but took comfort in the knowledge that Harold Macmillan had shivered there before him. (One day Macmillan dropped into his old quarters and found Mehta stretched out on a sofa. ‘He must think that the college has gone to the dogs.’) Would Ved’s co-students also ...”

“... begin at under £22,000. It is worth recalling that when the great wage-inflation of the Seventies took many Labour voters into the tax net for the first time, the 1974-79 Labour Government discovered that they objected to paying higher taxes to help the worse-off. The Labour Party might find the same thing happening. They might also find that many of their ...”

“... In 1507 Damian, Abbot of Tungland – variously known as ‘the Italian’ or ‘Master John, the French leech’ – undertook to fly from Scotland to France. ‘To that effect he had a pair of wings made from feathers. When they were fastened to him, he flew from the castle walls of Stirling, but at once fell to the ground and broke his ...”

“... and what isn’t, the Council’s main concern is of course with cash. Out of office, Norman St John-Stevas would say that government provision for the arts was wholly inadequate: in office, he reduced that provision. Lord Gowrie, better attuned to his party’s mood, was so far from thinking the grant inadequate that he cut it again and encouraged the ...”

“... soldiers knocked on the door and killed her uncle, aunt and two cousins. The murders, which took place during the ferocious violence of the German retreat, seem to have been intended as a reprisal for Albert Einstein’s existence – her uncle was Einstein’s cousin. She and her twin sister, whose surname wasn’t Einstein and didn’t sound ...”

“... like a moth beating against a bulb, briefly altering the light. In 1832, Carlyle reviewed John Wilson Croker’s new edition of Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson, and emphasised, as Hermione Lee has noted, how biography, by recording ‘many a little Reality’, can make the reader see the world as it existed around the central figure, its depths and ...”