“... was the Russian doctor Nikolai Pirogov. He pioneered field surgery, a technique other countries took many years to catch up with: he used ether to dull the pain, and introduced the system of triage which all armies would come to adopt. Pirogov worked in the Great Hall of the Assembly of Nobles at Sevastopol, where, the young artillery officer Leo Tolstoy ...”

“... Between​ the wars, the journalist Richard Usborne recalled in 1953, there was a feeling that John Buchan was good for you. ‘If not exactly the author set for homework, Buchan was certainly strongly recommended to the schoolboy by parent, uncle, guardian, pastor and master,’ he wrote in Clubland Heroes, a study of the thrillers he had enjoyed as a child ...”

“... think. He even tried to persuade his pet astrologer to discover favourable auguries for the match. John Fowles, typically, fantasised about seducing her and imprisoning her underground, not necessarily in that order. Pablo Picasso claimed that only the princess would be a suitable bride to be the châtelaine of his vast new villa, La Californie. At ...”

“... of a fine new biography, Gabriele D’Annunzio: Defiant Archangel. Perhaps immodestly, its author, John Woodhouse, who teaches Italian at Oxford, says in his Preface: ‘This is the first fully documented biography of Gabriele D’Annunzio in any language, and, within the limits of reason, given the bizarre nature of D’Annunzio’s career, the first ...”

“... National Security Adviser), but also supplied the President with what National Security Adviser John Poindexter called ‘plausible deniability’ by insulating him from the men like North who were actually implementing his covert operations. Split from one another and from Reagan himself, North and Regan were the doubles of the President they served. ‘I ...”

“... altar, down a spartan side-chapel, I pointed through some slats to the Coronation Chair. ‘They took it eight weeks ago,’ I said, ‘the Stone of Destiny.’ ‘How did they remove it?’ Ascherson asked. ‘They gouged it out. They broke the chair. It’s a 13th-century chair.’ Ascherson looked at me, then looked again at the dimly lit chamber. He was ...”

“... cheer to the rafters each time Germany scored a goal. 8 June. Spot the typo, spare the blush. John Vincent writes from the University of Bristol: ‘In your memorable diaries you quote Disraeli’s view of May 1881, a month after his death. Would that other historians had access to such primary sources!’ 14 June. Alan Bennett’s letter to the LRB about ...”

“... William Maginn, and the painter Daniel Maclise. Though the rumours put an end to her engagement to John Forster in 1835, nothing surfaced that she and her friends could not refute or explain away, and once she was dead, and in such a manner, the scandals faded into the background. It was said that she died of an accidental overdose, of tropical disease, that ...”

“... Iran. In addition to the CIA estimates, Richelson relies primarily on standard works – John W. Lewis and Xue Litai’s China Builds the Bomb (1988), George Perkovich’s India’s Nuclear Bomb (1999), Seymour Hersh’s The Samson Option: Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy (1991) – which he supplements with memoirs and ...”

“... of victory in a ‘just’ war: a war there had been no good way not to fight. Thomson’s father took him to see Laurence Olivier’s Henry V in 1945, the year after its release. ‘He said it was a matter of duty.’ The standard British movie fare of the day had plenty of ‘syrup’, he recalls, to ladle over the ‘suet pudding’ of tremulous national ...”

“... such as the idealised football player George Gipp in Knute Rockne, All American (1940), that they took up long-term residence in his consciousness. As president, Reagan routinely invoked the Notre Dame star when he implored subordinates to ‘go out there and win one for the Gipper.’ A Regular Guy, a mediocre football player, could supplant the star and ...”

“... merely how the game sometimes has to be played.The means they ultimately chose was to rally around John Major as the person best placed to stop Heseltine. Thatcher reluctantly came to accept this and therefore to accept the ostensible reasons they gave for her stepping aside. Very soon she would regret having fallen for it. Yet it had been clear for some time ...”

“... the dreams that attached themselves to him. In choosing ‘a well-rounded life’ as his subtitle, John Campbell risks some obvious jibes about his increasingly portly subject, but he delivers on its promise. It is a persuasive, if at times indulgent, portrait of a life rich in satisfactions. At its heart were a long, close marriage and three children, to ...”

“... miles from Salerno, on the west coast of Italy, and in January 1944 a convoy of 374 Allied ships took 25 hours to get there, at an average speed of barely five knots. They crawled towards their destination, trying to make as little giveaway whitewater wake as possible, and allowing for the blunt, roll-on, roll-off bows of so many of their number. They were ...”

“... attractor for patrons and lesser talents. To fund the Sierra reinhabitation, as Snyder saw it, he took on reading tours and an academic position at UC Davis, fifty miles down the road near the state capital, Sacramento. He called his land Kitkitdizze, after the Wintu Indian name for the aromatic shrub known as bear clover. Sliding down the electric window of ...”