“... ease with which a surgeon makes an incision, or a paleographer reads a manuscript, or a French baker slashes each baguette before it goes in the oven. It’s a matter of doing, not knowing, and it is gained gradually, through imitative practice.‘What has tended to be marginalised in the more recent history of imitation,’ Burrow writes, ‘is the aspect ...”

“... ships, heaving seas, the swivelling turrets of six-inch guns; our island’s story, often with John Mills. And yet, for all its links with history, its invocation of Drake and Nelson, the grip of the Royal Navy on the popular imagination of Britain is relatively recent, dating from what Peter Padfield refers to as the country’s ‘Navalist ...”

“... in Geneva and Helsinki. ‘He was a true conservative,’ his White House chief of staff Jim Baker said, ‘but boy was he pragmatic when it came to governing.’ Yet for Reagan, ‘pragmatism was always sheathed in the armour of moral certitude,’ Boot says. ‘His superpower was the ability to reorder the world in his mind as he wished it to be ...”

“... on in Lehman’s book, is that of Derrida. An equally soft-spoken authority called Houston Baker, on record as saying that choosing between Virginia Woolf and Pearl Buck is ‘no different from choosing between a hoagy and a pizza’, and that his ‘career is dedicated to the day when we have a disappearance of those standards’, can nowadays be ...”

“... of the City of London. In 1603, a quarter of a century after bricks began to be manufactured here, John Stow described its buildings as ‘filthy cottages’. Since then, the area, whether one calls it Spitalfields, Whitechapel, Tower Hamlets, Banglatown, has been a byword for poverty and violence. ‘A land of blood and beer,’ a rector of Hawksmoor’s ...”

“... himself, at one point denouncing American policy as ‘based on lies and distortions’. James Baker, George Bush’s secretary of state, barred him from entering the State Department. ‘I was offended by his glibness and his criticism of US policy – not to mention his arrogance and outlandish ambition,’ Robert Gates, then deputy national security ...”

“... she met the person she would later refer to as her ‘wife’, and also as ‘the monster’. Ida Baker, just a few months older, was a ‘colonial’ too: her family was from Suffolk, but she’d spent the first years of her life in Burma, where her father, an expert in tropical diseases, had been a doctor in the Indian army. She was taller than the other ...”

“... the case with Alzheimer’s that illness uncovers truth, it seems both to Murdoch’s husband, John Bayley (‘Puss’), and to her biographer, Peter Conradi, that it did so here. In their view Murdoch’s advancing illness, crumbling away language and reason, laid bare in her an essential impulse toward love. As words broke up, it was the vocabulary of ...”

“... was his uncle Arthur, an antiques dealer friendly with Maurice Chevalier and Josephine Baker. Arthur introduced him to the circus, then to nightclubs and music halls. As de Baecque points out, Melville’s gangster films invariably include a ‘fetish’ scene in a cabaret, a place set deep in ‘the heart of Jean-Pierre Grumbach’s native ...”

“... Heron was living in Wear Garth with his younger sister Michelle, her boyfriend Darren ‘Psycho’ Baker and her two children. He told officers he didn’t know Nikki, but he sort of did. Sometimes she played with his nephew and he had offered her sweets.One​ of the first people I met when I went back to the North-East was retired constable Joe Bradley, who ...”

“... one Sinatra’s name was often linked with. Consider the following, from Cosa Nostra (2004), John Dickie’s history of the Sicilian Mafia: ‘Anyone who was worthy of being described as mafioso therefore had a certain something, an attribute called “mafia”. “Cool” is about the closest modern English equivalent.’ Discourse among ‘men of ...”

“... it has delivered, comparing its new system to the reconciliation process in South Africa.Steve Baker, the Northern Ireland minister, said last October that the Act was needed ‘because the chances of justice are now vanishingly small’. Others argue that the existing measures, imperfect though they may have been, were working too well for the ...”

“... may be a few lost souls who’ve never heard of him. Forget the overrated (and vapid-looking) Chet Baker. Art Pepper (1925-82) was an authentic American genius. One of the supreme alto saxophone players of all time – Charlie Parker included. A deliriously handsome lover boy in the glory days of his youth. A lifelong dope addict of truly satanic fuck-it-all ...”

“... hostility to the Community. She was still strong enough to ensure that her favoured successor, John Major, took over, but it soon became clear that he had no more intention than Lawson or Howe of hewing to her vision of Europe. With scarcely over a year in office behind him, Major signed the Treaty of Maastricht, after negotiating an opt-out from the ...”

“... signed by its sender and encrypted to its receiver’. The public key, or address, is matched, as John Lanchester handily described it in the LRB, to ‘a private key which provides access to that address’. A key is really just a string of numbers and digits: the public key demonstrates ownership of any given address; the private key can only be used by the ...”