“... it wouldn’t have noticeably dimmed the young man’s appeal. Before long the German poet Stefan George came on the scene – Hofmannsthal’s gay friend Leopold von Andrian described him as looking like ‘an ageing hermaphrodite’, though he was no more than a hatchet-faced 23 – and was even more smitten. A sort of – chaste? – German pendant to ...”

“... the treasure of health’, which drew on the work of the 15th-century alchemists Thomas Norton and George Ripley, who in turn were indebted to the formulations of Ramon Llull, a 13th-century Majorcan polymath. The key to alchemy was deep reading, between texts and across the ages. Keynes’s scrabbling about for Newton’s papers was as nothing compared to the ...”

“... to follow. But Two Thousand Million Man-Power stops dead, for no apparent reason, shortly after George V’s funeral procession in London on 28 January 1936. It thus omits a key event in the story of the bomber’s increasing supremacy, the Spanish Civil War, which broke out in July (Guernica was hit on 26 April 1937). The focus, towards the end of the ...”

“... has analogies with another new theatrical fashion: the ‘humours comedy’ of the mid 1590s – George Chapman’s An Humorous Days Mirth (1597) and Jonson’s Every Man in His Humour (1598) are well-known examples – and the slicker, smuttier ‘city comedies’ of Thomas Middleton, Thomas Dekker, John Marston et al, which follow slightly later. Like the ...”

“... evangelical Christians seemed more powerful than they had ever been. They had helped to re-elect George W. Bush in 2004, in spite of a rickety economy and the disastrous invasion of Iraq. They had waged a successful campaign in Washington to restrict access to late-term abortion. They had launched a series of ballot initiatives intended to prevent states or ...”

“... Arriving in Johannesburg in 1941, Mandela was quickly recruited into the ANC by the remarkable Walter Sisulu, the grandfather of a whole ANC generation. Sisulu (who, at 76, is still in jail and well worth a birthday celebration or two) was the son of a white father who had quickly abandoned his mother, a black washerwoman. He had little education, and had ...”

“... is a German one to steal the secrets of British naval dispositions. Scudder was a good agent, Sir Walter Bullivant of the Secret Service explains, but ‘he had a lot of odd biases, too. Jews, for example, made him see red. Jews and the high finance.’Buchan’s biographers, starting with Janet Adam Smith in 1965, tend to hold up this turnaround as evidence ...”

“... as he was able. Born around 1485, he was a teenager at the turn of the new century. His father, Walter Cromwell alias Smith, was a more or less successful businessman whose brushes with manorial justice were practically routine. His mother’s name may have been Katherine, and her origins can be traced with some close detective work to the Meverell family ...”

“... hatred of orchids and his views on Darwin? Why did he praise Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and not George Eliot?), that we need to focus more accurately. We get precious little of that kind of definition from Kemp. Instead, we are presented with a tiring stream of second-hand generalisations. One of the consequences of Kemp’s recoil from morbus Ruskinianus ...”

“... we move to its equally emblematic ending with the opening of the Métro. This is work inspired by Walter Benjamin, as Prendergast says, whose ‘imprint’ is to be found ‘virtually everywhere in the following pages’. But the influence has been thoroughly assimilated, converted into practice. Benjamin has provided insights and ways of seeing, but above ...”

“... Italian Communist, Antonio Gramsci, and a famous Italian ex-Communist, Ignazio Silone. After this, George Orwell is discussed with special attention to The Lion and the Unicorn and Albert Camus in relation to the Algerian war. The following three chapters are devoted to Simone de Beauvoir, Marcuse and Foucault. The last author (and the only live one) is the ...”

“... candidate for Parliament, Lamb thinks Eden was wrong in failing to back sufficiently Gwilym Lloyd George’s determination to put curbs on coloured immigration, particularly from the West Indies. He puts this down to Eden’s unwillingness to spoil his image as a moderate, which presumably accounted also for the failure to press trade-union legislation ...”

“... Now, of course, there is no intrinsic incompatibility between novel-writing and history-writing. Walter Scott was an admirable historian – here indeed lay most of his strength. A case can be made, too, for saying that Flaubert, in L’Education sentimentale, was a better historical thinker – showed a more advanced grasp of historical causation – than ...”

“... to keep financially afloat, ‘Squeeze Play’ revolves around the death of former baseball star, George Chapman. Written by ‘Paul Benjamin’, and narrated in the first person by Max Klein, a private dick, it’s much the best bit of Hand to Mouth. The snappy dialogue and quick-fire clichés sit much more happily in this decent New York yarn than in the ...”

“... 1930s and 1940s by Western diplomats serving in Moscow, including the future American Ambassador, George Kennan, who praised it as the most faithful guide not only to 19th-century Russia, but also to Russia under Stalin. It is a rich source of aphorisms for Russianists and travellers to Russia, who are not likely to disagree with such observations as that ...”