“... copy. This would then circulate by post among the members of the Correspondence Club. The idea took hold and the CCC, which was sent out in hand-embroidered linen covers, lasted, astonishingly, until 1990. The magazine, like the members themselves, presented a more or less conventionally feminine front, behind which the contents, which were confidential ...”

“... Petersburg. Among parvenus from other parts of Europe, few did better, at least for a time, than John Law, son of an Edinburgh banker, who gained an early reputation as a reckless gambler, but also as a brilliant thinker on economic matters. A companion from the gaming tables, the French regent Philippe d’Orléans, brought him to Paris in 1715 to reform ...”

“... The Daughter of Time. Richard III has attracted passionate defenders ever since Horace Walpole took up the cause in the 18th century. It appealed to the stubborn contrarian in Tey, and to her scepticism of experts. ‘A man who is interested in what makes people tick doesn’t write history,’ Grant and his researcher agree in The Daughter of ...”

“... sported by ‘Gorgeous Gussie’ Moran in 1949, designed by Teddy Tinling, whose costumes often took up more column inches than the women’s performance on court. In the boardroom, men continued to call the shots. The first woman to sit on the executive committee of the All England Club was Virginia Wade in 1982.Many professional sports were barred to ...”

“... why he was recruited by MI6. He was a natural. Hamilton McMillan (‘Mac’), an old Balliol chum, took him aside for the traditional sounding out. The chain of clothes shops, AnnaBelinda Ltd, in which Marks had an interest, could be used as safe-houses, dead letter drops; could expand into Romania and Czechoslovakia. Belinda was the wife of the eccentric ...”

“... if politically marginal, 1968 movement, eventually founding his own ‘anti-theatre’. He took the Antiteatr’s coterie of waifs and strays with him into cinema, making three or four films a year between 1969 and his early death in 1982. Very roughly, his career can be divided into three phases: early minimalist films noirs such as The American ...”

“... of popular music, spinning the Beatles in a new direction. Meeting Shankar changed things for John Coltrane, too, helping him shake his dependence on drugs, while opening his ears to Eastern scales. Before Philip Glass worked with Shankar on a film score in 1965, he had been churning out unremarkable pastiches of French neoclassicism fused with folksy ...”

“... federal Republic will be indispensable to the continuance and integrity of the Union itself,’ John Quincy Adams wrote when he was Secretary of State, at the time of the Monroe Doctrine, and even those who didn’t want to be part of the US but wanted independence from Spain looked to American democracy for a better system of government and often went into ...”

“... diaries, which Tynan bequeathed on his deathbed to his daughter Tracy. They have been edited by John Lahr, the perfect choice for the task – indeed, an inescapable one. Lahr is Tynan’s true successor at the New Yorker, reviewing theatre for the magazine, as did Tynan, and, more important, filling his loafers as its premier celebrity profile writer, its ...”

“... with her friend Katherine. They wrote it most evenings in the desolate hours between the end of John Craven’s Newsround and the arrival of the ice-cream van on their housing estate, a period marked by the combustion of chip pans in the kitchens of the negligent, pans then carried hurriedly onto doorsteps and thrown into the air like torches at a Viking ...”

“... 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 Oxford Poetry 1927, and ...”

“... out, these concerns are not new. In 1875, less than ten years after the movement was founded, Sir John Strachey, a senior British colonialist, asked his colleague John Palmer to infiltrate the madrasa at Deoband and to report back on what he found there. Having taken a look Palmer concluded: ‘there cannot be a better ...”

“... 1775-83, when the 13 American colonies sought to secede from Britain, most African Americans who took up arms did so on behalf of King George III (having been promised emancipation for doing so). By contrast, in the Civil War, the overwhelming majority who took up arms fought for the United States (the Confederacy having ...”

“... shared faith broken, a Christian community irreparably divided. This was how the London annalist John Stow, who lived through the entire process, understood it, with much nostalgic mourning for all those seasonal rituals and festivals and the social reconciliation they symbolised, a slightly more sophisticated version of the common saying that it was a merry ...”

“... dim sense of underachievement. ‘Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face,’ wrote John Updike in Self-Consciousness, a metaphor which gives a startling tilt to our assumptions about fame and its consequences. In a bravura feat of imaginative reconstruction Gordon Burn has taken the idea of celebrity-as-affliction a step further and pursued one ...”