“... wearing earrings. Mind you, even in the butch 1940s Mickey Rooney, Vincent Price, Clifton Webb and William Powell played nearer to the other end of the man’s men spectrum, to appreciative audiences. To say nothing of pretty-boys Cary Grant and Leslie Howard. Kanfer doesn’t by any means dismiss the argument, but he isn’t sure that loss of American ...”

“... on nuclear weapons. When the New Start treaty between Russia and the US was ratified in 2010, William Perry, a defense secretary under President Clinton and one of the chief advocates of nuclear nonproliferation and eventual abolition – ‘global zero’, as it has come to be known – remarked that even though the treaty was ‘small, it was ...”

“... writes to Alfred Kazin in 1944, before reassuring the burgeoning critic that he belongs ‘in our camp’. Later: ‘The reviews are incredibly vulgar, so why read them?’ One can applaud a novelist for not reading his reviews, but not reading them and obsessing about them for 60 years? This is what we might call the low style. To Melvin Tumin, just after ...”

“... in the Kremlin wall, as well as foreign Comintern luminaries such as the US union activist William ‘Big Bill’ Haywood. Physical incorporation in the walls of the citadel was the ultimate honour for the illustrious dead. As Brown says, the walls haven’t gone away. Circumvallation thrives, and not just as heritage townscape: today’s barriers are ...”

“... in 1992: ‘A Month in Dachau’, in which a Russian man takes a holiday in the German death camp to indulge in an orgy of masochism, torture and cannibalism. The ideological function of this was, of course, to draw a parallel between the Soviet and Nazi experiences as equivalent totalitarian horrors; the recurrence of this banal theme in Sorokin’s ...”

“... She joins the Cheka and in 1926 is promoted to deputy director of the Moscow region forced labour camp. She continues at this exacting post in a busy part of the Gulag until the early 1930s. We must not think that Ransome, as a foreign correspondent, was somehow shielded from the grim realities. On the contrary, his matchless contacts gave him access to the ...”

“... the aftermath of slavery, freedpeople throughout the South demanded access to land. When General William T. Sherman met with a group of black ministers in Savannah in January 1865, he asked what would enable the emancipated slaves to live as free people. They answered: ‘Give us land.’ Sherman set aside a portion of coastal South Carolina and Georgia for ...”

“... of Spanish flu was recorded on 4 March 1918, when a military mess cook called Albert Gitchell in Camp Funston, Kansas, reported sick with a headache and fever. By the following day a hundred others had reported the same symptoms. A hangar was requisitioned to house the men, but flu has an incubation period of a couple of days, and had already moved on, aided ...”

“... as centurion in four Roman legions, rose to the rank of primus pilus in Legion V (Macedonica), was camp prefect for Legion VI (Victrix), was put in charge of the fleet at Misenum in southern Italy, and became procurator of Liburnia, where his inscriptions are: all of which seems a long way from Britain. But Legion VI was based at York and Roman soldiers moved ...”

“... the Balkans. (The status of the FAU being incomprehensible to his captors, Burns was in a POW camp for 733 days. When he was finally repatriated, his health was too poor for him to return to frontline service.) Ridgway served as an ambulance driver in Syria, Lebanon and Italy, as the Allies pushed the Wehrmacht up the boot. Not until the war was ...”

“... In​ 1955, William Strath was asked to produce a report for the government on the possible impact of nuclear conflict on the UK. Strath, a former tax inspector, economic planner and experienced civil servant, came to the conclusion that Britain was unlikely to emerge from a nuclear attack as a functioning society, never mind as a nation able to wage war ...”

“... returned to Florence. In December 1944, Guido was arrested by the British and sent to a prison camp near Terni. I haven’t been able to determine what the exact charges against him were. Released in July 1945, he began to rebuild his career, apparently without too much trouble. In 1947 he became the director of the Conservatory of Bologna, and in 1950 was ...”

“... caution to the wind, and it is the Mendelians whom Radick has in his sights, first and foremost William Bateson (1861-1926) of Cambridge. The bulk of the book is given over to the controversy that raged between Bateson and W.F.R. Weldon (1860-1906) of University College London and later Oxford, and between their allies, over the interpretation and ...”

“... just seen his former lover, Hanna Schmitz, convicted of war crimes: she had been a concentration camp guard, something he hadn’t known when she seduced him as a 15-year-old boy. None of the roles he saw played out in court appeals to him: ‘Prosecution seemed to me as grotesque a simplification as defence, and judging was the most grotesque ...”

“... that there were 3200 prisoners in Abu Ghraib, 700 more than its capacity. I heard Major General William Brandenburg, who oversees US military detention operations in Iraq, say: ‘We’ve got a normal capacity and a surge capacity. We’re operating at surge capacity.’ A year before, I had heard the President promise ‘to demolish the Abu Ghraib ...”