“... of naval intelligence, Lieutenant Commander Fleming undertook a secret mission to Washington in May 1941. He was ‘whisked off to a room in the new annexe of the embassy, locked in with a pen and paper and the necessities of life’, a colleague recalled, and there he wrote, ‘under armed guard around the clock, a document of some seventy pages covering ...”

“... Party scored only 20.5 per cent – a defeat of historic proportions. The European elections on 26 May delivered an even more crushing blow, as the SPD collapsed to only 15.8 per cent. In current polls the party is trailing in fourth place with barely more than 10 per cent of the popular vote. Twenty years ago, in their last decisive electoral victory, they ...”

“... a slave-driver’s lash. Scots, in that sense, were the non-commissioned officers of empire; even Robert Burns, a sentimental abolitionist, planned to take a job in Jamaica as an overseer of slaves. The same myth suggested that Gaelic emigrants raised in a clan system had a special rapport with traditional societies. In fact, Highlanders behaved with ...”

“... declares at the start that he knew and liked Trevor-Roper and that in writing this Life ‘I may have been influenced by feelings of loyalty, affection and gratitude.’ He leans towards the ‘fundamentally nice’ view. But the niceness was not apparent to many people, who had to judge Trevor-Roper by what and how he wrote. The prose style he adopted ...”

“... the CIA’s Counterintelligence Staff for nearly a decade. What he felt about Philby’s betrayal may only be imagined because he kept his thoughts to himself and rarely – perhaps never – mentioned Philby’s name again. Morley​ tells the Philby story in both his books, and he tells it well. But he makes no serious attempt to weigh its full impact on ...”

“... 5500 in 1977. The yard had just two orders on its books – the Type 42 and the rig – and so in May 1984 another thousand job cuts were announced.The stagers wanted to strike. Albertina had already secured them several significant victories; under his leadership, they had been reclassified as semi-skilled workers, which got them a pay bump. And he’d ...”

“... have been the first to think musically about punctuation. The eminent 18th-century grammarian Robert Lowth had compared punctuation marks to rests in music. Period, colon, semi-colon and comma are ‘in the same proportion to one another’, Lowth noted, as semi-breve, minim, crotchet and quaver.The signature of Nelly’s performance as a narrator is the ...”

“... vapours of the past. It is fastened by two rusty lockable latches, but there are no keys, so it may have to be prised open. I haven’t tried. It is very heavy and I loaded it into my car with difficulty. My mother, who was with me that day, was unusually quiet as I drove her home. She simply said: ‘If you open that suitcase you’ll never close it ...”

“... Harvard, she sacrificed her academic career to finish the editorial work her mother began. Readers may not agree with the version of Emily Dickinson they presented, or approve of the changes they made to her work, but if it hadn’t been for these two women, we might not have any Emily Dickinson at all.Born in Cambridge in 1856, Mabel Loomis was convinced from ...”

“... for a short while. Álvaro de Campos was two years younger than Pessoa and slightly taller. He may have been Jewish. He was a dandy who drank absinthe and smoked opium. In an early poem he expressed a desire to ‘eat the universe’, but as he grew older he became more melancholy (‘it would have been better not to be born,/For no matter how interesting ...”

“... in the 1930s. Any reflection on the strange career of this form has to begin there, however far it may then wander from him. Built around the work of Walter Scott, Lukács’s theory makes five principal claims. The classical form of the historical novel is an epic depicting a transformation of popular life through a set of representative human types whose ...”

“... would become Israel’s prime minister and withdraw the last Israeli troops from Lebanon in May 2000. On the morning after the April 1973 killings, the Lebanese lined up for and against the Palestinians. Sunni Muslims demanded that the Palestinians be allowed to defend themselves, to conduct a commando war against Israel from Lebanon and to maintain an ...”

“... trade and investment. Yet they are locked in a conflict which, according to President Trump, may yet result in a complete ‘uncoupling’ of the two economies. The Trump administration, meanwhile, is doing its best to sabotage the WTO, in large part because it has failed to tame China’s rise.The Covid-19 crisis has pushed into the background the ...”

“... as once, at least, the river has seen slaughter. It was in 1388 that Richard II’s favourite, Robert Vere, led his army floundering along this flooded valley, desperate to escape his baronial pursuers, who eventually caught up and cut most of them down a little upstream at Radcot Bridge.15 February. R. and I go down to Leicester Square at noon, the Tube ...”

“... According to this line of reasoning – proclaimed in Hungary by Viktor Orbán, in Slovakia by Robert Fico, in Germany by the nationalist leftist Sahra Wagenknecht and the pro-Russian AfD, and in the US by sub-Trumps like Vivek Ramaswamy – Putin’s invasion was merely regrettable (though Trump himself called the first stage of the attack ...”