“... a spy, merely an unusually observant visitor who already knew what to look out for. He and Anna took a house, The Priory, well away from the diplomatic quarter in Arts and Crafts country at Hammersmith. This was where William Morris lived at Kelmscott House and where in October of that year he died. It was Morris, along with Ruskin and occasionally ...”

“... troops, clearly served Putin’s domestic purposes, giving him a patriotic ratings boost that took his approval figures from a sluggish 45 per cent in February to 66 per cent in mid-April. But it was mainly a response to the altered balance of power in Kiev. In previous years, Moscow had sought to retain an effective veto over the political set-up in ...”

“... Nobel laureates per capita than anywhere else in the world. The other winner was Arthur Lewis, who took the economics prize in 1979. Walcott won his in 1992. By happy coincidence they share a birthday and the government makes a fuss of its favoured children with a Nobel Laureate Week each January. Asked my business at the airport on my way to record with ...”

“... refers to the management of three major studios, MGM, Paramount and 20th Century-Fox. The Nazis took movies very seriously. Urwand opens his book by recounting a discussion of King Kong in 1933 by members of a committee convened to decide whether the film could be ‘expected to damage the health of normal spectators’. The expert witness from the German ...”

“... or more precisely of the difference between two moments: the summer of 1915, when the novel by John Buchan on which it’s based began to appear in serial form, in the middle of one world war; and the summer of 1935, when the odds on the imminent outbreak of another were shortening by the day. The film takes from the novel its title, the name of the ...”

“... end up on the Tryal were bought in Montevideo in 1804 by a man called Alejandro de Aranda. He took them across the Andes to Valparaíso – a journey three times cheaper than sending them by sea around the Cape – with the intention of moving them on to Lima, to be sold again. As they reached the most dangerous section of the pass, Aranda relied on their ...”

“... Christmas 1938, Lowell, home from Kenyon College where he’d enrolled to study under Tate and John Crowe Ransom, crashed his father’s car. Stafford’s skull and jaw were fractured and her nose crushed. The Lowells were more concerned with their car and their son’s mental instability than with Stafford’s injuries. There was a rumour that the Lowells ...”

“... It took me​ a long time to accept my mother’s brain was failing. I knew the usual pathways of her thought, the jumps she would make from this to that; these jumps were new. She’d always made her mind ours too. When we were teaching my little brother, Richard, to talk, to say ‘ta’ for a proffered rusk, my mother would stop me and my other brother, George, from speaking ...”

“... could do all these things, with operations stretching around the globe.In the late 19th century John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil had a monopoly on oil refineries, pipelines, rail transport and storage facilities in the US, but it didn’t control US oilfields, and – to start with – depended on British oil traders to ship its products to Europe. In ...”

“... this technique into his most significant creation, the Daily Mail. In 2012, the journalist John Rentoul produced a satirical essay on the art of the newspaper headline called Questions to Which the Answer Is ‘No!’ It was a homage to Harmsworth, the Mail and their many imitators. Harmsworth had a lifelong thirst for curious facts. On a world tour ...”

“... he disliked anti-slavery far more. In 1859 he led the detachment of US Marines that captured John Brown, following the failed raid on Harpers Ferry. But Lee considered Brown marginal, even ridiculous; as Guelzo shows, it was the emergence of the anti-slavery Republican Party that politicised him. On Abraham Lincoln’s election in 1860, seven Southern ...”

“... that duty in drastically different ways. Alexis’s intellectual path was strikingly his own. It took him some time to find it. Family connections secured him an (unpaid) post of juge auditeur – a junior magistrate – at Versailles, but he had no particular aptitude for the work, and had not attained a salaried position by the time he left for good in ...”

“... He was definitively despatched by Gore Vidal some long while ago. Conor Cruise O’Brien then took his furious turn at the coconut shy. And here is Hitchens, lobbing adjectives like grenades in the same cause. It’s all too much. One can’t easily imagine anyone wasting so much ink and anger over, say, Bernard Levin – Britain’s answer to ...”

“... there were more police up from Scotland Yard to see her: Detective Inspector Moffatt, for one, who took her to the Police Training College for an interview which lasted most of the day. She told Mr Moffatt that she was a member of the IRA, and used to carry guns from Dublin to Belfast. She said she had taken explosives up from London to Manchester for the M62 ...”

“... great challenges to his concentration from trying to give up, and that poor old Charles Lamb (who took up smoking while trying to give up drinking) was stuck miserably, like the poor cat in the adage, between temptation and abstinence, to the detriment of his powers. If I was to update Calverley I would include a stanza or two on the splendour of cigarettes ...”