“... selling them armoured vehicles at an inflated price. McChrystal was also invited by General Doug Brown, as the head of Special Operations Command his boss between 2003 and 2007, to join the board of a Virginia-based company called Knowledge International. KI’s uninformative website doesn’t mention that it’s the US arm of a UAE-based firm set up by a ...”

“... the use of superphosphates, generously subsidised, seemed a magical way of turning the great brown country green; whenever anyone looked for a mineral they found it; vast schemes were begun designed to turn Australia into the rice bowl of South-East Asia; Australia’s own people’s car, the Holden (virtually General Motors), poured off the assembly ...”

“... This isn’t as far-fetched as it seems. ‘Do you know,’ he wrote to his old schoolfriend Bill Townend in April 1939, ‘a feeling is gradually stealing over me that the world has never been farther from a war than it is at present . . . No war in our lifetime is my feeling.’ He was not alone in this lack of prescience, but few of his fellow ...”

“... ages and orientations. ‘To a young undergraduate,’ the former Labour minister and SDP leader Bill Rodgers recalls, ‘his reputation for having fought with the 1st Airborne Division and for entertaining girls who left his college rooms at dawn was an irresistible combination.’ Lurching between intense concentration and reckless frivolity, he was the ...”

“... particularly interesting species of the genus’. Burghley’s son Robert Cecil seems to fit the bill rather better. Yet even he, inhabiting, as his biographer Pauline Croft notes, ‘the grey world of administration’, was a different species from Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset, or even George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham; and the title of her essay puts ...”

“... in functional and aesthetic performance’ – it had to go Pop. For Banham, Archigram fitted the bill, and in 1963 this adventurous group (Peter Cook, Ron Herron et al) proclaimed ‘throwaway architecture’ as the future of design. Archigram took as its models ‘the capsule, the rocket, the bathyscope, the Zipark and the handy-pak’, and celebrated ...”

“... of Macaulay’s lacerating review) began political life by passionately opposing the Great Reform Bill in the Oxford Union. The man who in old age was to be both revered and mocked as the People’s William started out with the firm conviction that ‘the majority will be in the wrong.’ And the startling steps by which he found himself among the Liberals ...”

“... this aroused soon caused her hands, apparently joined behind her lover’s back, to become a small brown paper parcel under the arm of a stout engine-driver who leaned, probably drunk, against the baskets, his cap so far forward as almost to conceal his face. I could not banish the thought that what I had first seen was in fact his own androgynous fantasy, the ...”

“... The receiving clerk described him as 5 foot 8½ inches tall, 140 pounds in weight, with grey eyes, brown hair and a sallow complexion. (However, in a passport application in 1914 he is an inch shorter, and his eyes are blue.) His face was ‘full of pimples’ and ‘pitted’ with small scars – the facial lesions associated with secondary ...”

“... a hairdresser is born. The beauty of the girl’s hair when closely inspected plays a part. ‘The brown was more than just brown. It was a million shades of glossy reds and a melange of dark chestnuts. The hair slid through his fingers like silk, each strand light as gossamer.’ But it’s the charged interaction with Keir ...”

“... his wars with his Muslim neighbours. The hostages were rescued, albeit at vast expense (the final bill for the expedition, at £9 million, was nearly double the original estimates), and Theodore committed suicide in his ruined fortress, shooting himself in the mouth with a pistol he had been given as a present by Victoria. The fortress was cleared, its ...”

“... who have been milling about the capital for two decades but whose command has now shifted from Bill to Hillary. Despite their differing styles, the intent is the same: rewarding friends and punishing enemies, the latter with such precision that one of her staffers fears Hillary will come to seem little different from ‘Nixon in a pantsuit’. The sense of ...”

“... a bath. The flat was always warm with the communal central heating kept going in the basement by Bill, the boilerman, and often after a bath, in the living room, my parents would play a game of ‘He’, where ‘He’ was naked me, twisting out of their reach and running away from one, whose fingers tickled their way between my legs to my vulva, to the ...”

“... A huge crowd has gathered. Alexander Bloch from PEN, an elegant figure in a pin-striped suit and brown suede shoes, nods towards the speakers and says: ‘The strong, silent Russian hasn’t been invented yet.’ Madame Bloch asks me if I do not think the translation of Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera rather ‘unfortunate’. Our programme says we are to see it ...”

“... was thinking of returning to England. The approximate day of his departure is established by a bill of exchange, which records that he deposited 35 rupees with the Ambassador and was authorised to draw the same amount from the English factors in Surat. The date of this bill is 13 November 1617. The route of his last ...”