“... we understand the same rule to apply here? If Tony Blair had been charged with selling honours for cash, could he (or John Reid, or Jacqui Smith, or whoever was home secretary at the time) have procured the grant of a pardon in the name of the queen? I can’t think any British lawyer would give an affirmative answer to the question. One ground for rejecting ...”

“... the first ‘gas bridge’ were complicated. The Soviet president, Leonid Brezhnev, wanted the cash from energy exports to Europe to help fund the arms race with the US and support the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. But other members of the nomenklatura felt the money should be used differently. Kosygin thought it should be channelled into civilian ...”

“... and he soon became a must-see metropolitan attraction. Joshua Reynolds painted his portrait and William Parry did an ensemble piece of Mai, Solander and Banks. Mai met the king, Dr Johnson and Fanny Burney; a play about him was performed at the Theatre Royal; he learned to play chess and backgammon, and many agreed with Mrs Thrale’s comment about the ...”

“... a vat of nutrient juices had been a staple of speculative fiction at least since the 1920s. In ‘William and Mary’ from 1954 (twice rejected by the New Yorker), Dahl embeds that cliché of genre fiction in a dodgy relationship between a bullying academic husband and a resentful wife. The don agrees to have his brain taken out so it can live on after his ...”

“... postage stamp. Confusingly, the photographs span forty years and are left to speak for themselves. William Strudwick’s ‘Old London’ shots taken in the 1860s show much that had disappeared by Booth’s time: medieval coaching inns and the Lambeth riverside that was destroyed by the Albert Embankment, for instance. In the 1870s John Thomson’s portraits ...”

“... symbolically locked the doors of the Jacobin Club. ‘This woman could close the gates of Hell,’ William Pitt said. She was still only twenty.The mood after the Terror was hectic, a combination of relief and post-traumatic shock. All three women were in difficulties. Térézia was famous but broke. Her husband had made off with most of her dowry and Tallien ...”

“... R&B singer Barry White and radical artists such as Archie Shepp, Nina Simone and Miriam Makeba. In William Klein’s Festival panafricain d’Alger 1969, Shepp can be seen on stage with some Touareg musicians. Ted Joans, introducing him, shouts, ‘Jazz is a Black Power!’ ‘We are all Africans,’ Makeba declares to applause. ‘Some are scattered around ...”

“... drawn by his Grand Theft Auto aesthetic of fast cars, tight suits, women in bikinis and wads of cash. One YouGov study found that 60 per cent of British boys aged between six and fifteen had heard of Tate and 23 per cent of boys between thirteen and fifteen had a positive view of him (a majority had a negative view).As Tahsin and Shea continued to work on ...”

“... of all the doctors themselves ... my father’s colleagues lived from month to month on whatever cash their patients provided and did a lot of their work free, not that they wanted to or felt any conscious sense of charity, but because that was the way it was.’ These are considerations to keep in mind; and when, in countries lacking a national health ...”

“... your home as a volatile asset. The canny speculator should be alert for the optimum moment to cash in. Three-bed flats are on offer at £750,000. The average rent in the street is calculated at £1666 per month. Inspired by this febrile vision, householders dig. There are seven basement excavations in progress. Wilberforce Road is unlisted and schemes for ...”

“... its demolition in 1941 was a disgrace.Augusta Persse was born in 1852, and in 1880 she married Sir William Gregory, who was 35 years older than her. He died in 1892, and she outlived him by forty years. Lady Gregory made herself useful to Yeats, as Roy Foster shows in his biography of the poet, because of her interest in folklore and her knowledge of the area ...”

“... that there were 3200 prisoners in Abu Ghraib, 700 more than its capacity. I heard Major General William Brandenburg, who oversees US military detention operations in Iraq, say: ‘We’ve got a normal capacity and a surge capacity. We’re operating at surge capacity.’ A year before, I had heard the President promise ‘to demolish the Abu Ghraib ...”

“... of plants and animals, including humans, altering our genes and causing cancer. As she wrote to William Shawn, her editor at the New Yorker, where her book was serialised before its publication, ‘I have a comforting feeling that what I shall now be able to achieve is a synthesis of widely scattered facts, that have not heretofore been considered in ...”

“... it up, just go out there and kill Soviets.’ These orders came from a most peculiar American. William Casey, the CIA’s director from January 1981 to January 1987, was a Catholic Knight of Malta educated by Jesuits. Statues of the Virgin Mary filled his mansion, called ‘Maryknoll’, on Long Island. He attended mass daily and urged Christianity on ...”

“... wildly gesticulating husband.The person who is really shown up by the story is, of course, me.Tony Cash tells me that he saw A Lady of Letters done on French TV. When Miss Ruddock is watching the young couple who live opposite her she remarks: ‘The couple opposite just having their tea. No cloth on. Milk bottle stuck there, waiting.’ This has been ...”