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“... letter-writers. The most interesting are not the ones written to his brother from the Peter and Paul Fortress describing his mock-execution and pardon, about which he made little at the time, or the account he later gave his brother of his time in penal servitude. These things were all to be written up later by the novelist. Unlike Lawrence, Dostoevsky is ...”

“... battlefield archaeology team found a terrible concentration of musket balls and grape shot in that corner of the moor. It was there the battle was decided.This time, the Highland charge did not break through. The artillery barrage tore into them as they moved forward. ‘It has been calculated that the six guns firing into the centre and right of the advancing ...”

“... of US Forces in Nato, invited Zuckerman for a drink, and said: ‘We have painted ourselves into a corner. How do we get out of it?’ It isn’t clear that Zuckerman had an answer, but his logic forced people to put the correct questions. In 1964, Harold Wilson asked Zuckerman to go to the House of Lords and become Minister for Disarmament. Zuckerman very ...”

“... along with stories about musketeers. I killed giants vicariously; I liked the legends. In 1858, Paul Morphy, a boy from New Orleans, played a count and a duke in a box at the Paris Opera during a performance of The Barber of Seville, and chose to throw away his major pieces one by one, finishing with the most elegant mate imaginable. In ...”

“... storerooms, lighting their path with burning wads of Styrofoam. They headed for a specific corner, where an important collection of Islamic coins and the museum’s most precious cylinder seals were stored. They took more than 5000 cylinder seals and 5000 pieces of jewellery, but dropped the keys to the safes, so that the most valuable items survived ...”

“... so. Perhaps we are in the realm of that more general, sexually innocent homoeroticism discussed by Paul Fussell in The Great War and Modern Memory (1975) or in Martin Taylor’s less fashionable, less thesis-driven anthology, Lads, republished in 1998. In Taylor’s collection, so often are the poems bad, unaware (Ronald-like?) or puny that the best among them ...”

“... sonnets, his most famous and least typical poems, which had just been praised by the dean of St Paul’s for their ‘pure and elevated patriotism’. Churchill’s threnody to an already mythical soldier-poet appeared in the Times three days after his death: ‘Joyous, fearless, versatile, deeply instructed, with classical symmetry of mind and body, he was ...”

“... Moore sinks to his knees straightaway and prays for a considerable period of time, and Piers Paul Read similarly. Some admiration for this, men who pray in public not uncourageous, though more often met with at Catholic rather than Anglican services. The service is conducted by Father Kit Cunningham who talks about Anna, saying how she had summoned him ...”

“... or two, the people wake up, and the ship of state slowly rights itself. The British historian Paul Kennedy, in The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, published in 1987, offers a very different view. This is not the story of twenty to thirty-year cycles of intervention and laissez-faire, but of two to three hundred-year cycles of imperial ascendancy and ...”

“... for not ignoble victims of a natural instinct reputed vicious in the modern age’. As with St Paul, hate and love of the persecuted were closely bound up. Symonds speaks of the personal misery flowing from the Vaughan affair in striking vocabulary: ‘It was a severe strain upon my nervous and moral strength – this probing of Vaughan’s case, this ...”

“... could.’ This was the sketchy outline I carried with me to New York on a trip, with the producer Paul Quinn, to research a radio programme about the Beat heritage. I’d never been there before, never met Corso. I’d seen him, in the tweed sports jacket of a young academic, performing, sober, at the famous Albert Hall ‘Wholly Communion’ readings on 11 ...”

“... laps at the New Orleans Athletic Club, and nightly Brandy Alexanders at Victor’s around the corner. But mortality was the thing that drove him. ‘Without that idea of imminent death,’ he remarked, ‘I doubt that I could have created Blanche DuBois.’ Throughout his life Williams insisted that he worked every day, by which he meant every day, seven ...”

“... clappy’ evangelical meetings in church halls. Helen remembers her parents going round the corner to the neighbour’s house to watch the TV news that summer. On 12 August 1969 the Battle of the Bogside began in Derry and trouble soon spread to Belfast. Nationalists rioted and attacked the police, while loyalists burned Catholics out of their homes. In ...”

“... of her reports from Chechnya have been published in English – A Dirty War (2001) and A Small Corner of Hell (2003); they were followed by Putin’s Russia (2004) and A Russian Diary (2007), which give an acerbic account of Russia’s domestic scene (though here too the war in Chechnya is never far from the surface). Nothing but the Truth is based on a ...”

“... asks him how much Zweig shelled out for lunch. ‘Two and six,’ Brecht replies, a Lyons Corner House or something (and at the time the multi-millionaire Zweig was residing in Portland Place), and then it’s straight back to discussion of the revolution.Further west, in Princeton, or much further, in Pacific Palisades, Thomas Mann and his family ...”