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“... 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 ...”

“... many of them left-leaning intellectuals, and the story of their ‘duping’ is familiar from Paul Hollander’s Political Pilgrims (1981). David-Fox makes it a more complicated and more interesting story, with the West seen bamboozling the Kremlin while the Kremlin bamboozles gullible Westerners; the Soviet side is no longer a monolith but includes a ...”

“... swimsuits, cocktails and jazz – at times Scott Fitzgerald is staying at the hotel down the road. Paul Rosenberg, Picasso’s canny, conservative dealer, backs up the big spending, encouraging him to trot out easy-on-the-eye charmers to keep Olga in Chanel couture. Not long after the return to Paris, however, the need arises to bring another literary ...”

“... stoical insouciance of people who’d remained. The administration on the run was now headed by Paul Reynaud, a maverick conservative whose Churchillian instincts were never likely to prevail. Reynaud declared Paris an open city, but it was of no consequence for the many who’d already left and those who were scrambling out at the last minute. Hanna ...”

“... touched with a characteristic Hrabalian oddity: ‘In the little pub overhanging the river, in a corner by the window, I was reading. You were weeping, I too was weeping and the tubby landlady was weeping.’ In the early 1950s, he was a member of an underground literary group run by the poet Jiri Kolar. His poems had now become stories, but he did not ...”

“... savage passes through Tahiti, from Rousseau by way of Banks and the besotted crew of HMS Bounty to Paul Gauguin.And there were much gossiped about passages of dodgy behaviour on home soil. Departing on the voyage to the South Seas, Banks left behind a young lady, Harriet Blosset, so convinced he had made a promise to marry that she spent three years knitting ...”

“... Her blessed declensions: I may, I can, I will and I shall; and you shall see for yourself. The corner we occupy in devotion is small, very small. ‘It seemed to me that this little thing that is made might have disintegrated into nothing because of its smallness.’ But the hazelnut that Julian of Norwich saw ‘lasts, and always will, because God loves ...”

“... make sure no one remained, and was now being pulled up. I spoke to one of the other people there, Paul Verryn, a Methodist bishop whose church was raided by police in 2008 after he opened it to Zimbabwean refugees. He told me he had come to offer counselling to anyone who needed it. He had been here during some of the Khuma rescues, he added, and seen the ...”

“... AI open source again’ and necklaces that read ‘own your data’; one man had a Ron Paul 2008 sweatshirt. Everyone was trying to find the actual DOGE engineers in the crowd of young men. ‘I’m sick of Elon,’ a political consultant told me. ‘He’s not funny. After he’s done doing all of this, he better give a billion dollars to the ...”

“... beginning in 1979 with the dramatic increase of interest rates under the Federal Reserve chair Paul Volcker and continuing with Reagan’s tax reforms, which together brought about an enormous wealth transfer to high earners and the already well-off. Eight years earlier, Nixon had removed the dollar from the gold standard, which meant that the state had ...”

“... of predators, hustlers, mobsters, clubhouse politicians and tabloid sleaze that festered in a corner of New York City, a vindication of his mentor, the Mafia lawyer Roy Cohn, a figure unknown to the vast majority of enthusiasts who jammed Trump’s rallies and hailed him as the authentic voice of the people.The notion of a Trump literature ...”

“... Church as it would have seemed to contemporaries, who did not know that civil war lay round the corner. Collinson has done for early 17th-century religion what Conrad Russell has done for early 17th-century politics. He leaves the Church in the late 1620s where Russell has left Parliament – a very long way from revolution. The Jacobean Church was a broad ...”

“... of a Chatwin or a Naipaul, let alone fostered a Kipling, a Somerset Maugham, a Hemingway or a Paul Bowles. No one has had a greater yearning or been better qualified to fill this gap than Donald Richie. ‘Almost everything I do, everything that is known about me, is connected to this country,’ he wrote. ‘To be a person so intent upon describing a ...”