“... astonishment, never forgave him for showing such ‘weakness’. Neither did his friends. It took William Taubman almost twenty years to complete his wonderful Khrushchev: The Man and His Era. This Gorbachev biography took a mere 11. And yet it is in some ways an even more heavyweight product. The research is vast; the tracking down of published and ...”

“... it up, just go out there and kill Soviets.’ These orders came from a most peculiar American. William Casey, the CIA’s director from January 1981 to January 1987, was a Catholic Knight of Malta educated by Jesuits. Statues of the Virgin Mary filled his mansion, called ‘Maryknoll’, on Long Island. He attended mass daily and urged Christianity on ...”

“... Those condemned to this liminal existence looked back on the notoriously harsh Changi prison camp in Singapore, where they had first been incarcerated, as a haven of order and plenty. Lieutenant Watt was believed to have been killed in the defence of Singapore, the War Office informed his mother. Ten months later, a message came via the International Red ...”

“... occasioned by a wet Scottish summer.This is a bit unfair. The recent struggle for the right to camp on Dartmoor is a reminder that Scots should be glad of the 2003 Act, which, among other things, formalised the traditional right to roam and established a community right to buy. But change in the distribution of ownership has been painfully slow. A report ...”

“... We buy a luminous blue and white Victorian tile at Gabor Cossa which one of the partners thinks is William de Morgan but isn’t and then cross the road to the Fitzwilliam. I take in a chance selection of pictures, dictated by which happen to be in range of available banquettes, and in particular the Van Dyck portrait of Archbishop Laud. It’s hung beside one ...”

“... than a hundred pages to launch the French ‘philosophy of the concept’, composed in a prison camp in a few months in 1942. And Wittgenstein wrote the 80-page Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, his revolutionary critique of Russell and Frege, from the trenches of the First World War. It does nothing to belittle the achievements of Cavaillès and Wittgenstein ...”

“... treasures of his well-stocked mind, his poetic imagination, his mystical obsessions and his high camp sense of fun with anyone who was worthy, as well as with quite a few ... who were not. It was Jacob more than anyone else who taught Picasso to speak a French which was ‘idiomatic and witty, and on occasion eloquent (despite a heavy Spanish ...”

“... be the case, has caught on in a big way. It is all made up by the media, and by those faithful camp-followers of art who tell us on radio or TV what they were ‘trying to do’ when they wrote, painted or composed. The fashionably perceptive novel, like Julian Barnes’s memorable Flaubert’s Parrot, cannot find out what it is looking for, or what is ...”

“... story of the fall in paradise, and rewrites it in the bleakest terms. This is a book that makes William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, the most eminent of its literary forefathers, look like a study in innocence – perhaps because its undeviating gaze focuses on Eve, not Adam. Like Atwood, Wiggins places her fall in remembered history. Charlotte and ...”

“... on him much of the virulence of the anti-British propaganda campaign run by the American Zionist camp. Yet when the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry recommended the immediate entry of 100,000 Jewish refugees from Europe to Palestine and the eventual creation after a period of UN trusteeship of a binational state in which Arabs and Jews should have equal ...”

“... daring lies in its imaginative range, its matter-of-fact way of incorporating concentration-camp episodes into a large-scale realist novel with a dozen settings and scores of characters, each treated with impartial sympathy and curiosity. This man is a general, that one a physicist, the next, Eichmann. Grossman was also brave enough to equate the Nazi ...”

“... of North America. Cook’s journals and the reports of other enlightened travellers, including William Marsden’s History of Sumatra (1783) and Arthur Young’s studies of French agriculture (1787-89), were intended as major contributions to knowledge. Marsden’s work was inspired by his regular attendance at the Royal Society’s ‘philosophical ...”

“... its stranglehold on Victorian Oxford and Cambridge, whatever was happening in Göttingen – and William Morris’s many poems, romances and saga translations. Morris, indeed, perhaps deserves more space. He kept up with the scholarship, travelled in Iceland, knew the languages first-hand, and created a semi-socialist northern wonderland of his own in his ...”

“... began defining ‘The Playboy Philosophy’ – a kind of ‘hedonistic utilitarianism’, as William F. Buckley put it. The magazine was originally designed, Hefner admitted, as a ‘romantic reflection of earlier times’. His achievement was to associate sex with upward mobility by making his readers feel they were part of an elite gentlemen’s ...”

“... and inspired numerous copies and spin-offs.Few subjects or scenes were too ambitious or too camp to be treated as topics for a hippodrama. Audiences could see ‘Rocinante and Dapple flying to heaven on a cloud, blue-eyed cremello ghost horses carrying the spectres of defeated Indians, castles that go up in flames, Lady Godiva, horned horses, the ...”