“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... your cock out, with no shame, as I have done’ than it was to follow orders.Ion Antonescu, who took control of the Romanian state in September 1940, oversaw the deaths of more than 280,000 Jews and 11,000 Roma. The pogrom in Bucharest, led by the Iron Guard, saw Jews tortured and skinned alive, their bodies hung from butchers’ hooks in a twisted ...”

“... educated and the heirs of the Philosophes, looked like a more enlightened way of ordering things took on a very different appearance when it was a matter of enforcing vertu by requisitioning grain or putting an end to practices that were not supposed to exist but always had done. Anyone who might be tempted to interpret such conflicts in terms of ideology or ...”

“... stories, the rituals more than games or gestures? Must we really suppose that the Greeks always took these funny things seriously? The important issue concerns the mental attitudes, the beliefs and the feelings, which lie beneath and explain the behavioural facade. That, in brief, is the problem of interpretation, and our whole understanding of Greek ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... off’, marking up the copy to show how the text should be divided up into pages. Then compositors took the pieces of type required to make a single page, laid them out in rows and packed them on top of each other into rectangular blocks. These were tied tightly with string, placed into frames called ‘chases’ and further secured with wedges to hold ...”

“... which disguises rather than describes what goes on. His way of mocking this obfuscatory language took many forms. The simplest was to get words deliberately wrong, and allow the commentary to continue none the less. Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling was usually the fall-guy: INTERVIEWER: Sir Arthur, where did you strat your work? SIR ARTHUR: I think it can be ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”