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“... based on Conrad’s last mission at sea. The British government, in the thick of the First World War, had enlisted the ageing celebrity for a brief, hopefully not too dangerous foray in the North Sea to hunt for German U-boats. The trip was undertaken without incident and – as its captain, James Sutherland, recorded – without any great satisfaction ...”

“... less obviously, on weaponising the economy to secure political power: a combination of culture war, patronage and mass clientelism. The specificity of these characteristics tends to be missed by those who equate contemporary right-wing populism with fascism, or see populism as a new ideology, or assume that ‘ordinary people’ brought all this on ...”

“... rates both before and after the Revolution. The suicide rate seems to have dropped during the war years between 1914 and 1921, though in the absence of systematic monitoring, one can’t be sure. But in the 1920s the experts resumed their work, now with more secure professional status and support from the modernising Soviet state, which in its early years ...”

“... Sound​ is war,’ a sound tech I know likes to say. He means that when you try to extend its life, things get messy. Sound is fragile and decays quickly; when you fight that, it can become wild. Plug a bunch of instruments into amplifiers to try to get the sound of a rock and roll band to vibrate in the ears of twenty people in some dirty little club and you have trouble on your hands ...”

“... secret data. At the same time he was educating himself in the disagreeable facts of America’s War on Terror, and the moral and legal implications of the national security state. He was pressed by larger doubts the more he learned. Not all these particulars emerged in the interview, but all could be inferred; and Snowden’s profile differed from that of ...”

“... War was looming when Alexander Korda’s film Fire over England was released in 1937. It stars Flora Robson as Elizabeth I, and as the opening titles roll the voiceover sets the scene: ‘the free people of a small island’ defy the tyranny of a Continental power and ‘a woman guides and inspires them.’ Robson, firm of jaw and bristling with double-decker ruffs and farthingales, outwits the dastardly Spanish and the Armada is defeated ...”

“... between the family members might be a fiction, and that Joseph Skizzen himself might be a Nazi war criminal. Skizzen has been lying about his age for most of his life, and near the book’s end we are told that he has the option ‘to forget the order he had been given by the High Command’. The line can be understood as making a mocking reference to an ...”

“... to use her as a mole, but they never got around to asking her for information, and by the time the war started she had drifted away from the Party. Around the same time Hart joined the war effort by going to work (hired on Jenifer’s recommendation) for MI5, where he was regarded as invaluable. In the course of their ...”

“... whole of English history, certainly since 1066, has been a history of plunder by the governing class and its officials and other hangers-on.’ (More had written, and Hoskins quoted the line three times: ‘So God help me, I can perceive nothing but a conspiracy of rich men procuring their own commodities under the name and title of a ...”

“... was encouraged; and much was done to promote the interests of the newly enfranchised working class. Sidney Webb chafed at the untidiness of municipal autonomy, but he was aware of the potential of civic government. He recognised that the Victorian burgher may have seen himself as the arch-opponent of collectivism – ‘“Socialism, Sir?” he’d ...”

“... or Marsh Arabs. Like most residents of Maysan, the Marsh Arabs are Shia, and after the 1991 Gulf War they participated in a rebellion against Saddam. Their punishment – Saddam drained the marshes and destroyed their entire way of life – was one of the greatest environmental-cultural abuses of recent years. Wetlands became desert, Marsh Arabs became urban ...”

“... so out of sight? I went to track down three canvases by Coldstream in the stores of the Imperial War Museum. They hung at waist height on the fourth sliding rack of the Cs, facing into a recess, from which position the glare of the corridor striplight fought against them from behind; nonetheless, they kept a comfortable dignity in this limbo. Their paintwork ...”

“... way into the navy by offering the government the use of his family’s boat during the First World War. As Lloyd Steven Sieden explains in his 1989 biography, the navy formed Fuller’s intellectual ideals. Ever after, he aspired to be as comprehensively informed and autonomous as a ship’s captain in the age before radio, when there was no higher authority ...”

“... true, is likely to feature in any anthology or critical account of the poetry of the Second World War, and assiduous scholars of both Hill and Ashbery have explored Prince’s possible influences on their early work. And yet, despite the eloquent advocacy of these two recently departed giants, his work remains a specialised taste. A YouTube video of him ...”

“... Bertrand Russell, who was lecturing in America, found himself trapped there by the outbreak of war. His situation was made worse because of his publicly expressed views on sex and marriage: for instance, the proposition, in Marriage and Morals, that ‘the total amount of undesired sex endured by women is probably greater in marriage than in ...”