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“... in secrecy long after Kennedy was dead.For years, the accepted history of the crisis held that the young president faced down the Soviets’ reckless gamble with calm and unyielding resolve. As Secretary of State Dean Rusk, who knew better, summarised it: ‘The other guy blinked.’ This version stood unchallenged not least because it was sanctioned by ...”

“... well compensated, of Hamed Qassim, brother of the revolutionary leader Abdul Karim Qassim. Before young Ahmad left he hid his ping-pong table behind a wall at the family estate, so Aram Roston tells us in his biography The Man Who Pushed America to War (2008). The revolution cost Hadi the bulk of his fortune, but after a brief period of austerity in a small ...”

“... and to side with the ‘genius of the system’; Stroheim’s reputation has suffered as a result. Arthur Lennig’s new critical biography is not likely to restore it. This is an old-timey book that calls to mind the film societies of another era, the noise of a 16mm projector at the back of the room, the smell of mimeographed programme notes. It tells an ...”

“... The poet of home and hearth, of family values and traditional roles, was a single mother. Captain Arthur Hemans had walked out of the family home in 1818, when his wife was pregnant with their fifth son. What’s more, her father had deserted her as well, leaving his wife when Felicia was a child. Felicia Hemans wrote for money, a vulgarity which compelled ...”

“... wrestlers, as she supposes. During the siege of the Peking legations in the Boxer Rising, the young Pelliot showed himself an intrepid man of action, and on his return to Paris he was involved in a celebrated public brawl with someone who imprudently criticised his teacher. Marco Polo’s account of his putative travels is a highly problematic item for ...”

“... If​ you are British and no longer young, the title for a brand new Philip Larkin poem is liable to enter your head at least once a day. This morning it was ‘Order of Service’. It’s not as good as ‘High Windows’ or ‘Dockery and Son’, but it has the same doleful ebb. Searching in an old folder, I found an order of service for Larkin’s memorial at Westminster Abbey on 14 February 1986 ...”

“... anti-fascist celebrities: Heinrich and Golo Mann, Hannah Arendt, Anna Seghers, Simone Weil, Arthur Koestler, Victor Serge, Walter Benjamin, Franz Werfel and his wife Alma Mahler, Lion Feuchtwanger, Konrad Heiden (Hitler’s first truthful biographer), Marc Chagall, Jacques Lipchitz, Moïse Kisling, the young Claude ...”

“... and ruin them. At the same time, there was a culture of male rakishness in the big city. The ‘young sports’, as they were known, were patrons of Anderson’s. Their interests lay in ‘the Sports of the Ring, the Turf, City life, such as Sprees, Larks, Crim-Cons, seductions, rapes’. When Mary died, Bennett’s paper promoted the idea that she had been ...”

“... intention of translating Dostoevsky and Gogol. Soon after his arrival the Japanese attacked Port Arthur: Baring offered himself to the Morning Post as a correspondent, and set off to cover the campaign in Manchuria, attaching himself to a Cossack horse artillery battery. Later he sent back reports on the Russian revolution of 1905, and, travelling backwards ...”

“... beautiful, and range from sweet girls next door to more feisty types like Ginger Rogers and Jean Arthur, Myrna Loy, June Allyson and Jeanne Crain belong here, and their purpose is to reassure the women in the audience and reaffirm the goals of society. Exaggerated women is the category with the biggest stars: ‘ferocious women like Joan Crawford, Bette ...”

“... pride was replaced by retrospective anger at those senior strategists, like Air Marshal Sir Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris, who from safe offices and Ops Rooms sent so many young men to futile and agonising deaths. The Dam Busters was made in 1954, when the myth of Bomber Command’s strategic success was still relatively ...”

“... dreamed of as a boy poring over Jock of the Bushveld’, and, incidentally, crossed the tracks of Arthur Rimbaud, who had trekked up and down those ‘routes horribles’ forty years before. The Danakil journey set the pattern for a life that turned into a perpetual tramp through the wilderness: as officer in the Sudan Political Service; in the Empty ...”

“... a dying man’s eyes. This is where things go half-baked. In Johnny’s delirium, pictured as a J. Arthur Rank version of Expressionism, the paintings in the artist’s room line up as an audience or congregation, and a priest, Father Tom, hovers among them, trying to make himself heard over an actual conversation between the artist and his friend on the ...”

“... in the war. In Moscow, he formed a close alliance with the American Raymond Robins and a young Arthur Ransome, far the best-informed foreign correspondent in the country. Robins, a personal envoy of Woodrow Wilson’s, urged full recognition of the Bolshevik regime. Ransome, who knew the team around Lenin and had won their trust, passionately ...”