“... been paid in months; they were keen to find a home and a regular paycheck in America. Boris’s best friend was the shop-manager. In February I flew with Boris and my assistant to the factory in St Petersburg, hoping to hire about 50 jewellers. I was incognito: the owner of the factory, a Russian millionaire and, so I was told, notorious mobster, knew only ...”

“... and Swann’s At the Drop of a Hat and Peter Cook’s suggestion that we call it ‘Quite the best revue I’ve seen for some time. Bernard Levin’, the point being that whatever the notices this could go up at the front of house.27 January. A woman writes to me saying that having read a piece I’d written about him, she has tried to read Kafka but ...”

“... promised to continue to make us leaner and fitter. The Liberal Democrat Manifesto was by far the best-written, while the Tories seem to have dumped into theirs every idea anyone in the Party ever had: my favourite was the promise on page 41 to plant a new Midlands forest. I decided not to buy the SNP Manifesto for the simple reason that it cost a fiver. Week ...”

“... Choosing​ a husband for Elizabeth I was always going to be tricky, but in 1560 the diplomat Nicholas Throckmorton announced that he’d figured it out. Throckmorton’s choice would strengthen Elizabeth’s claim to the throne, unite the island of Britain and guarantee peace with France. His candidate was intelligent (if not quite as scholarly as Elizabeth), above average height (at five foot eleven), well educated, attractive, good humoured, age appropriate, healthy and athletic, and shared Elizabeth’s interests in music, dancing, hawking and riding ...”

“... Gentlewomen, honest Matrons, and virtuous virgins’. And while it is probably best to treat paratextual puffs with a dose of scepticism, it is true that Partridge’s text is a mechanism for redistributing knowledge, particularly across lines of gender and class. Recipe collections like Partridge’s are arresting in part because they ...”

“... is a leader among his young generation of novelists and was unlucky not to make the twenty alleged Best of British. Different as this novel is from its predecessors, one can discern in it traits typical of his fiction-writing generation. Whereas in the Sixties and Seventies the adventurous novel hybridised with journalism to create docufiction, in the Nineties ...”

“... beyond the standard confines of the Grand Tour into Ottoman lands. In 1751 James Stuart and Nicholas Revett had undertaken a journey to Athens to measure and record the standing remains of the ancient city – the first time, they insisted, this had been done properly. In 1762 the Society of Dilettanti published Antiquities of Athens, based on Stuart ...”

“... are approximately two hundred miniatures, including examples by leading practitioners such as Nicholas Hilliard (b.1547), Isaac Oliver (b.1565), John Hoskins the Elder (b.1590), Samuel Cooper (b.1609), Richard Cosway (b.1742), John Smart (b.1741) and George Engleheart (b.1750).Miniatures pose many curatorial challenges. These are objects which were ...”

“... push him away), but feeling that we have somehow incorporated him into ourselves. The word I like best for my experience of Wagner’s work is ‘engross’, because it means to absorb totally and to write in large letters and, in Shakespearean usage, to make fat or pregnant. Who has engrossed whom is not clear to me. Have I swallowed Wagner or has Wagner ...”

“... may turn out to be more interesting than anti-slavery itself.The voyage of the Recovery provides Nicholas Rogers with his subject in Murder on the Middle Passage. The torture and murder of the unnamed girl off the coast of New Calabar has never received more than passing mention in histories of the anti-slavery movement, probably because it was a scandal ...”

“... brilliant – and brilliantly funny – exposés of various hidden corruptions of American life. Best known – and by far the most hard-hitting – was The American Way of Death, which made her journalistic name, as well as making her the enemy-in-chief of the funeral industry for her account of its self-serving, unnecessary and highly lucrative ...”

“... Saudi Arabia to become its chief supplier. In Poisoned Wells: The Dirty Politics of African Oil, Nicholas Shaxson argues that these developments are alarming. While the people who live in Africa’s big oil-producing countries are getting poorer and angrier, their leaders ‘have a rising tide of money at their disposal’ and are ‘fit for mischief’. He ...”

“... has produced good books on Katharine Hepburn and Marlon Brando in the past). He does his best to like Bogart and Bacall, though he seems a little perplexed by the discovery that they were difficult people, even pains in the neck. Who knows how many readers will care now about their curious, brief passion? It is nearly eighty years since the ...”

“... out to be pretty worthless, as he admits). A former foreign correspondent himself, he is at his best describing Stanley’s journalistic stints, both in America, Stanley’s adoptive country, and in Abyssinia, where he made his name as a reporter – two episodes which Frank McLynn, surprisingly in a much fuller work, skips over. McLynn offers both a ...”

“... polity he envisioned: fruitful, multicultural and economically prosperous. The city offered the best port on the Egyptian Mediterranean, and essentially the only point of access to the breadbasket of the Delta and the inland Nile. After Alexander’s death, Soter, one of his generals, made the city the capital of the Ptolemy dynasty, a suitable location for ...”