“... her radical beginnings as they did, Dame Iris’s spiritual journey not all that different from Paul Johnson’s.10 February. At Christmas G. and R. gave me a subscription to This England (‘Britain’s Loveliest Magazine’), which at first seemed a conventional magazine of the countryside with thatched cottages, country houses and even Patience ...”

“... castle on the private island of Brecqhou (as did Tony Blair and David Cameron), and on their 197-foot yacht, the Lady Beatrice. Not long after her death, a bronze bust of Thatcher was installed in the Ritz’s lobby.By then the brothers had been in the hotel business for half a century. Born within ten minutes of each other in 1934, they grew up in a family ...”

“... first few months in England were spent in my grandparents’ little brick bungalow, at the foot of Caesar’s Camp, near Folkestone. (Their house and lane have since disappeared – razed to make way for the stark, moonscaped run-up to the Channel Tunnel.) It was in those lonely, quiet days – the clock ticking on the mantel-piece, the adults ...”

“... and Lane Fox aptly reminds us of the incident in the Acts of the Apostles when Barnabas and Paul are mistaken for Zeus and Hermes. Often seeing and hearing were combined in the oracular centres where consultation of the god, most frequently Apollo, might be preceded by incubation and fasting and lamp-lit ceremonies. The gods were consulted on a great ...”

“... with its nostalgia for the old ways, and its little jokes about religion (‘my theory why St Paul speaks as he does of women: that he knew only church workers’). A diary entry speaks of ‘that English mixture of the genteel and the raffish’, another of ‘lovely Suffolk, how it combines amplitude with modesty, a model to the English mind’. A sort ...”

“... and critics, even in writing (notably to Edmund Wilson). In fact, Malraux may scarcely have set foot on the Chinese mainland when he wrote The Conquerors. Yet the book convinced no less a reader than Leon Trotsky that it was based on first-hand experience. It even convinced an old China hand like Jean Fontenoy, editor of Le Journal de Shanghai. ‘I do not ...”

“... the prosody of Don Juan is all very well, but how on earth did Byron get to Sintra on a club foot? As far as such literary prurience goes, Claussen remains high-mindedly Teutonic. Beyond a discreet allusion to the fact that female students found him attractive, a fact the photographs of him provided in this volume do nothing to confirm, there is not a ...”

“... in February 2002, just over a month after the first prisoners arrived there, shackled hand and foot, hooded and blindfolded by blacked-out goggles. Stafford Smith’s description of a hunger strike that began on 6 July 2005, ending briefly only to start again on 11 August, is harrowing. In a parody of medical care, and in violation of the Tokyo prohibition ...”

“... on the Welsh side of the Welsh border, became a political activist at 14, in 1935, when Michael Foot, just down from Oxford, was his local Labour candidate – though the young Williams privately thought Foot too Oxford Union for Pandy village hall. In 1939 he entered Trinity College, Cambridge, an informal precursor of ...”

“... early 1950s to create a network of heliports across the region, public transport was on the back foot. Some modes (buses and trains) were scaled back, others (electric trams and the overhead railway) eliminated altogether. A new underground rail system planned in the mid-1960s was only partially completed. Cars were the future. In the early 1950s one in ...”

“... Disease – is “nuclear capability”.’ This does not mean that the US, as ‘the power with a foot on everyone’s doorstep’, is on the side of non-proliferation, unless this suits its ambitions. Popular protest against nuclear energy is not something the industrialised world as a whole tends to support. What is a danger in Iran may be a welcome ...”

“... and a way of getting electricity from coal. He also left five million pages of papers and records. Paul Israel’s dense and sometimes exasperating book is a fine example of the ‘many worlds’ theory of biography: Edison was incontestably one of the great Victorians. The Victorian label, however, gets harder to append when it includes people who, like ...”

“... close to his hero, not sentimentalising him or obscuring his weaknesses. Hobbled with a withered foot, a ridiculous mother, and an encumbered estate, Byron fought tenaciously while at Harrow for status. Inheriting a title without a suitable income at the age of ten could have been mortifying, but Byron spent his puberty acting the part of a peer for all it ...”

“... and time would be lost trying to clarify the matter.One such diehard shoots an American in the foot with a bow and arrow. The grandfather works out which window he’s firing from and waits for him to try again, then shoots. The archer tumbles onto the cobblestones, where he lies twisted ‘into a swastika’. A priest appears and gives the dying man the ...”

“... to publish the new story, but again, not the New York Times. Hersh’s next instalment focused on Paul Meadlo, who under Calley’s orders had fired clip after clip of rifle bullets at women and children. He tracked Meadlo to his family’s farm in Indiana, ‘a run-down mess’, as Hersh writes, where Meadlo’s mother told him: ‘I sent them a good ...”