“... for a few days: the disappearance would allow her to meet a lover in Paris. That conversation took place after my father had died. He had made tyrannical demands of her in his last years, so that his death came to her as a liberation. She could watch television without constantly being interrupted by shouts from his bedroom to make him a cup of tea; she ...”

“... Five. By the early 1950s, I was tearing at speed through the middlebrow bestsellers of the time: John Creasey, Nevil Shute, the wartime adventures of British officers who’d escaped, or tried to escape, from German POW camps, like The Wooden Horse and The Colditz Story, along with a stream of books about fishing. The nearest I came to reading ...”

“... Conrad and Olga, returned to Paris to live with Alfred, who refused to enrol them at school. He took them to lectures at the Collège de France and the Sorbonne instead, and to the opera. His second wife, a pianist and composer, enrolled Eric and his brother at the Conservatoire. According to one teacher Eric was ‘the laziest student’ in the ...”

“... months after Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt dissolved the unwieldy COI. A new Office of War Information took over propaganda and everything else went to the new Office of Strategic Services (OSS), run by Donovan. With an unlimited, unaudited budget exempt from congressional scrutiny, Donovan’s imagination flourished. He pushed for a 15,000-man commando raid on ...”

“... thoughts against thoughts in groans grind. For too long, Bishop had lived these moral choices of life/death, right/wrong, male/female: but at last, the early happy years with Lota had made them seem irrelevant, and Bishop, longing for Paradise since her blighted childhood, felt she had found it at Santarém: That golden evening I really wanted to go no farther; more than anything else I wanted to stay awhile in that conflux of two great rivers ...”

“... something of a symbol of Canadian independence from America, but scholars from both countries took part in a conference held a few years ago to assess his life and work: I was invited to speak about his time at Cambridge. The conference papers, edited by Roger Bowen, have been published, and Dr Bowen has also written an appreciative biography. Japanese ...”

“... of Orgreave, where thousands of police, led by mounted officers, repeatedly charged picketers, took place in June 1984, a few days before the action at Cammell Laird began. The miners’ strike also took up most of Fleet Street’s attention. Albertina, shop steward for the staging department at Cammell Laird, kept track ...”

“... existence under such titles as ‘Is Life Worth Living?’ and ‘What Makes a Life Significant’.John Kaag and Jonathan van Belle’s book is an anthology of these writings, from a letter James wrote when at Harvard Medical School in the 1860s to ‘A Pluralistic Mystic’, an argument against rationalising away mystical experiences that was published in ...”

“... The Reverend Robert Boughton, readers of Gilead will remember, was the best friend of the Reverend John Ames, the narrator of that novel, which is written in the form of a memoir addressed to Ames’s seven-year-old son, Robert, a name given to him by his father in honour of his friend. Both Ames and Boughton are in their late seventies; Ames is the still ...”

“... as the Department of Environment, Transport and the Regions (DETR): in effect, the Ministry for John Prescott, whose amour-propre demands a duly sprawling apanage. Mullin goes to Fenwick’s at his wife’s insistence, and buys three new suits. Early in 2001 he moves to International Development, only to get the heave-ho after Labour’s election win that ...”

“... were projecting a 50 per cent increase in the infant mortality rate. In a later memoir, John Maynard Keynes attributed the prolongation of civilian punishment to a cause inherent in bureaucracy. The blockade had become by that time a very perfect instrument. It had taken four years to create and was Whitehall’s finest achievement; it had evoked ...”

“... missionary zeal, scientific inquiry, dishing the French (or the Russians) – and the forms it took were too hopelessly various to fit a single model. The peopling of Australia with British emigrants, for example, had almost nothing in common with Britain’s rule – with a very small number of personnel – over countries like India and Nigeria, with ...”

“... overshadowed by a sale of Impressionist art at Christie’s, and almost escaped the attention of John Maynard Keynes, a Newton enthusiast. As it was, Keynes missed most of the lots, and shortly after the auction set about clawing back papers from successful bidders. Most of what he recovered concerned alchemy. On his death in 1946, Keynes bequeathed what is ...”

“... My story​ will be that John Harvard gave it to me. ‘Who’s that?’ I asked, pointing at a bronze bust in the reading room where I had arrived to give my lecture, and was told that it was the university’s founder, John Harvard. ‘Damn,’ I said. ‘It never even occurred to me that Harvard was a guy ...”

“... floating in the water. Dragging the corpse to land, he discovered it was Harry Gouge, a servant of John Dandy’s, whose watermill Wood had just left. He fetched Dandy, who came with two other men. Witnesses at the inquest testified that Dandy had often beaten Gouge, who had no water in his lungs, meaning that he hadn’t drowned. Other evidence came from the ...”