“... not where politics were concerned, and was rather slow in advancing his political outlook. It took him years to pay attention to the threat of the Bomb, years to notice the Holocaust, and decades to accept Stalin’s crimes. He also had a bizarre near aversion to the Civil Rights movement, which was active around the time he was enjoying his greatest ...”

“... of America for its behaviour in Vietnam could have implications for sterling. On 16 June 1965, John Stevens of the British Embassy in Washington wrote that ‘the administration still do not think that a devaluation of sterling would bring down the US dollar but this attitude may change as their hopes of strengthening the US balance of payments are ...”

“... black hair and dark moustache, produced a quirky resemblance to Lenin. Although his biographer John Bew finds the likeness ‘somewhat forced’, he notes that contemporary observers as different in their politics as George Orwell and the Daily Mail made sport with the superficial similarity. The British Lenin might all too easily have become the David ...”

“... shows a murky sea bottom with a section of tube that looks like marine junk. Here, as the curator John Jacob points out in his excellent essay in the Smithsonian publication, Paglen works against the obfuscation of terms like ‘cyberspace’ and ‘the cloud’; in his own words, Paglen aims to ‘rematerialise the network’ and thereby ‘to expand the ...”

“... the most tenacious champions of Trump’s decision have been the neoconservatives, from John Bolton to Paul Wolfowitz, who took us to war in Iraq. In the National Review, John Yoo, author of the torture memos, defended the legality of the assassination; Thomas Friedman ...”

“... learning of the Gelehrter bordered on reverence (the German terms are appropriate since Renan took so much of his inspiration from German thought and scholarship). Above all, he celebrated the ‘vocation’ of the scholar, complete with its religious connotations, an impersonal dedication to truth that raised one above the petty fripperies of partisan ...”

“... the centre of Chichester, where the Seven Deadly Sins had staked out appropriate shops (Gluttony took over the Real Cornish Pasty Company); in the cathedral, the damnation of Samuel West’s Faustus was staged at the high altar. But since the first half of the play was staged in the Minerva Theatre, it still only played to a maximum of three hundred ...”

“... complaining that he had ‘had my usual letter of abuse from that old fool Grosart’, but things took an altogether more serious turn when it was discovered, very late in the day, that Grosart had not only reproduced, without acknowledgment, entries he had already published in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, but had resorted to inventing some of his sources as ...”

“... who rather enjoy it.’ Twenty-five, thirty years after the best of them began to publish – John James, Chris Torrance, Lee Harwood, Andrew Crozier, Peter Riley, J.H. Prynne, Michael Haslam, Douglas Oliver, Barry MacSweeney, Denise Riley – they must nonetheless wonder, from time to time, whether theirs is a case of having missed the boat which would ...”

“... town. Most of the changes which gave us the modern criminal trial, and which are the subject of John Langbein’s book, came about in the last part of the 18th century and the first part of the 19th. Their legal and practical effect from 1822 to the present has been tracked in the 54 editions of the Criminal Pleading, Evidence and Practice of ...”

“... quality – a little like Weegee’s – at once random and composed. In one, the circus director John Ringling North dominates the right half of the frame, shouting instructions to an unseen person, while above and to the left a high-wire act has two showgirls suspended from the wheels of a bicycle: the picture frame is divided by a balancing bar carried by ...”

“... including a remarkable feat of railway engineering which linked the port to the new capital. It took 30 years to complete. ‘Between Massawa and Asmara,’ Wrong explains, ‘the land soars from sea level to 2300 metres in just 70 kilometres.’ At its steepest the Eritrean railway touched a gradient of 1 in 28. It is running again today, with steam ...”

“... eat like an elephant, work like a dog, and love my Dad and Mum as only their Van Dyke can.’ He took up smoking and sent his younger brother cigarette cards showing uniforms and battles. He revered his captain, ‘an awful sport’ who had won the Military Cross at the First Battle of Ypres. In July he was commissioned into the 3rd Battalion of the Royal ...”

“... to go back to Yale, where he moonlighted as a talent-spotter for his old deputy.Angleton took Matthiessen on a drive around Washington and told him that Paris was a plum assignment. Until then Matthiessen hadn’t realised he’d been hired. Three months of stateside training would be necessary. Matthiessen baulked at coming down to Washington ...”

“... the spring of 1919 he moved to Milan to work for Costruzioni Meccaniche Nazionali and in October took part in Italy’s first postwar motor race, the Parma to Poggio di Berceto hill climb. The following month he competed in the Targa Florio in Sicily. A spectator was killed when he ‘inadvertently crossed the finish line’, as Dal Monte puts it, ‘just as ...”