“... been grist to Brown’s mill – same old Tories looking after their own – but instead Brown took fright when he saw how popular it was. It was also Osborne who devised the political strategy to prise Brown out of office in 2010. He embraced the familiar Labour charge that the election offered a choice between Tory cuts and Labour spending. Yes, the ...”

“... bullets and if they come for me I am going to open fire.’ It is strange to hear George Bush and John Reid deny that a civil war is going on, given that so many bodies – all strangled, shot or hanged solely because of their religious allegiance – are being discovered every day. Car bombs exploded in the markets in the great Shia slum of Sadr City in ...”

“... flocked to acclaim him, and according to Pushkin, even the dandies ‘gave up Château Lafitte and took to eating cabbage soup’. Then came probably the most dramatic moment in Moscow’s entire history. After the immensely bloody and costly battle of Borodino not far to the west, Mikhail Kutuzov, the Russian commander-in-chief, decided with great reluctance ...”

“... was enlarged with the lease of the New Territories), which was virtually uninhabited when Britain took it over, incredible as that now seems, plus a few semi-autonomous ‘treaty ports’. Britain didn’t gain – because it didn’t demand – any exclusive trading rights with China; only free trade for everyone, including in Indian-grown opium. The main ...”

“... before with The Porcupine, based on the trial of the Bulgarian communist leader Todor Zhivkov. John Banville did it in a roman à clef about Anthony Blunt in The Untouchable; and the Russian writer Olga Trifonova presented her persuasive and well-researched portrayal of Stalin’s wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, in the form of a novel. All these bio-fictions ...”

“... froideur, but Decca’s Hons and Rebels turned the mildly eccentric Lord and Lady Redesdale (he took his mongoose to work to catch rats; she wouldn’t countenance anything made from pork) into braying grotesques. True, Nancy’s novels hadn’t helped, but they at least pretended to be fiction. Decca, by virtue of her moral courage and her politics, is ...”

“... Picasso’. Nor, when he began to work in partnership as an interior and furniture designer, and took on employees, was he any more generous-spirited. One young American who worked with him briefly, and in whom he had no interest (and of whom he had no memory), was John Cage. Goldfinger claimed to be a lifelong ...”

“... I’m being a singer.”’ There’s a crucial difference. Everyday British life in the 1980s took a turn towards the performative; style became a matter of exhibiting the right sort of ennui, and having the correct haircut. In our house, we were obsessed with Ferry’s hair, and at one point even my mother had a fringe falling over one eye. Fiona ...”

“... to experience: learning came by way of doing and making. Aligned with the American pragmatism of John Dewey (who was read at the Bauhaus), this idea was advanced by Albers, who took it with him in 1933 when he went to teach at Black Mountain College in North Carolina and later at Yale, where his impact was immense. For ...”

“... Bergman, for example – in that the lead characters in his works influenced the way the creation took shape, often guiding it into entirely new territory. There is an unspoken understanding between the film director and the actor that their involvement isn’t permanent: the actor may be offered a more desirable part, or the director may feel the need to ...”

“... settlement; why the King failed to dissolve or prorogue the Long Parliament; why Englishmen took sides in 1642; why negotiation failed in the same year; why the majesty of Charles I became so diminished that men were ready to fight him. Once these seven effects have been identified, it ‘becomes possible to match cause to effect’ with ...”

“... She began her address – ‘A Naturalist View of Persons’ – by saying: ‘According to John Knox, in his First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, it is “repugnant to nature”, as well as “contumely to God, and the subversion of good order”, to promote a woman to any position of superiority in any realm. We in the ...”

“... Cavendish himself and by four men who sailed with him, Antony Knivet, a young gentleman volunteer; John Davis, the great navigator; J. Jane, a friend of Davis’s; and Thomas Lodge the poet. Thomas Cavendish was a man of considerable estate but varying fortunes, and like many of his contemporaries he took to the sea to ...”

“... of our stage!’ His climactic description was elaborated in the Second Folio (1632) by the young John Milton: ‘Thou, in our wonder and astonishment/Hast built thyself a lasting monument.’ Historically, Shakespeare criticism begins with wonder, and that it should have returned there in these millennial times ought not to surprise us. This batch of studies ...”

“... he doth smite you under the first rib.’ The pamphlet bears the influence of the Leveller leader John Lilburne, a recurring figure in Como’s radical coalition and the subject of Michael Braddick’s commanding and enlivening new biography. Lilburne fought courageously for Parliament as the nation’s defender against tyranny, but turned his eloquence and ...”