“... into transcendental meditation and gets written up as a Muscovite avatar of a character out of Robert Stone or Joan Didion: Often silences fell between us. Much of the time I felt that she was not in my company at all, nor I in hers. She would close her eyes for long, still minutes, smiling crookedly … I don’t know how she conceived of me. She only ...”

“... of the Street. At times, the Rome that Long has unearthed from the documents looks oddly like Robert Musil’s Kakania.Yet as Piers understood, many individual projects succeeded, in a distinctively Roman way. In antiquity, aqueducts – gently sloping down to the city from springs and lakes in the Alban hills – had filled the city’s fountains and ...”

“... in their power … to confer upon you a certain favour, which if it does not cost you your life, may stick by you all your days.’The pox was also considered a badge of honour because it was associated with soldiers and sailors (men who were away from their wives for long periods and thought more likely to visit whorehouses and risk the ...”

“... library. Convalescence was transformed by a gift from his cousin, a copy of The Suicide Club by Robert Louis Stevenson.These glimpses were a romance of the road. Adolfo was feeding me titbits from twice translated interviews. But his portrait of Vaes, so decisively sketched, fired my selective misreading. The fiction of our weary march is that ...”

“... They also knew that an attack needed good weather and calm seas. No attempt had been made in late May, when heat records were shattered in the South of England, and German officials were confident that there wouldn’t be an invasion in early June either. The German forecasters told high command that there would be rain and gale-force winds in the English ...”

“... For​ the late French historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Thomas Robert Malthus was an indispensable guide to the agrarian past. Le Roy Ladurie applied Malthus’s argument that population grows faster than subsistence to the archives of Languedoc, where, in the empirical detail of parish registers, cadastral surveys, tax rolls and price series, he perceived ‘the immense respiration of a social structure’ over the course of three centuries ...”

“... from Rotherham who joined Ukip aged eighteen, stood for Reform in local elections in Yorkshire in May 2022. He got 89 votes. In the Wakefield by-election the following month, Reform received less than 2 per cent of the vote. ‘There were only five of us working on that,’ Wood told me. ‘A lot of us were clamouring for Nigel to come back. We knew we could ...”

“... Ashburnham held the many rare manuscripts that had been donated to the nation by the antiquarian Robert Cotton, as well as the treasures of the royal manuscript collections. The flames from a fireplace had caught on the wooden mantelpiece and spread to the wainscoting. Hapless librarians were throwing water on the blaze; the city fire engines were nowhere to ...”

“... fact. It was a charge perfectly commonplace among all who knew Ford, friends as well as enemies. Robert Lowell, who met him through Allen Tate near the end of his life, quotes the story of Ford, an over-age wartime second lieutenant, playing golf with Lloyd George and giving the PM a piece of his mind on golfing etiquette: had he refrained, he told ...”

“... in 1700, but that had as much to do with his asthma as with his bent for reclusive philosophising. Robert Voitle’s meticulous 1984 biography suggests a bustling lord of the manor rather than an idle lover of landscapes. The estate was above all a large collection of farms, and their landlord seems to have been active, and rather enterprising, in ensuring ...”

“... the ardent Galahad who will never take for granted that men are sometimes wicked on purpose; Robert Kee, the hot-eyed public prosecutor … When John Birt arrived at the BBC as Deputy Director-General at the end of the 1980s, apocalyptic assessments of the programme were back in fashion. According to Birt, the BBC’s Chairman, Marmaduke ...”

“... novels began to be rediscovered in the 1970s. While researching his screenplay for Chinatown, Robert Towne came across Ask the Dust and took up Fante’s cause. He optioned the novel and persuaded Francis Ford Coppola to do the same for the book Fante was then working on, The Brotherhood of the Grape (1977). In 1978, the poet Charles Bukowski mentioned ...”

“... disjointed articles that often contained internal contradictions.’ Little wonder that Sir Robert Anderson of the Criminal Investigation Department said that enough nonsense was written about the Whitechapel murders to sink a dreadnought. As in the Palmer and Bravo cases, inquests were crucial in maintaining the level of excitement. The ...”

“... recorded by an observer with Médecins sans Frontières – were common in Rwanda in April and May 1994, when Hutu extremists butchered up to a million people, mainly Tutsis but also Hutu moderates who were seen as ‘sell-outs’. The small United Nations force under Major-General Roméo Dallaire and the gallant contingent of the International Committee ...”

“... appetites, her secret certainly won’t be her nakedness). Kellas doesn’t twig, but the reader may remember Actaeon’s fate, transformed by Artemis into a stag and torn to pieces by his own hounds, thereby becoming an early victim of, as it were, friendly fire. It’s not quite The Hunt for Red October, but the quest for Astrid/Artemis in a warring world ...”