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“... truth that seemed to pervade society.’ As so often, war began in confusion and inadvertence. In June 1853, having made demands on the Porte which were designed to be rejected, Russia attacked the principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia. Nicholas’s worst miscalculation was his assumption that Austria would support him. Only a few years had passed since ...”

“... exterminate all Armenian males of 12 years and over’. On 20 April, the Armenians of Van rose in self-defence, and held on till a Russian advance reached them in May. Four days later, as British forces were about to land at Gallipoli, Armenian deputies and former ministers were arrested. In Anatolia, the killings and deportations spread, supposedly ...”

“... Sobchak, any more than Putin’s admission that he was a KGB officer (he soon resigned). Putin rose rapidly to become deputy mayor, where he gained a reputation for silent, chilly efficiency. In a period of wild gangsterism and corruption, he was considered clean. Some who knew him think that he suffered from pathological coldness, a deficit of ...”

“... team. By his account, a polling phenomenon known as ‘the Farage paradox’ showed that when Ukip rose in the polls, support for leaving the EU did the opposite. Sunder Katwala, the director of the think-tank British Future, noticed the correlation in 2014. For most of the four-year period between the euro crisis of 2009 and the rise to prominence of Ukip in ...”

“... Maria Mastai Ferretti when he acceded to the papal throne after a hurried two-day conclave on 16 June 1846, but he profited from the general relief at the death of his predecessor, the stern and reactionary Gregory XVI. The old pope had died at the age of eighty; the new man, who adopted the name Pius IX, was 54, with a warm personality and a ...”

“... was now in his thirties) the gentleman’s title of master. Cromwell was the boy from Putney who rose and fell at the court of Henry VIII with, as Diarmaid MacCulloch’s biography shows, spectacular unobtrusiveness. A man who in life strenuously resisted easy categories, Cromwell has been forced into the competing roles of hero and villain many times ...”

“... and professionally stuck, working as an ‘obscure assistant judge’ while his contemporaries rose through the magistracy. America provided a way out. Under the ‘honourable pretext’ of writing a report on the American penitentiary system, Tocqueville could leave France for a year and return with a publication that would restore his reputation. He and ...”

“... men, Proust and Elvis, Muhammad Ali and the Beatles, are grouped around an unfolding, vulval red rose. The only woman depicted is Jackie Kennedy in the open car, pink pillbox hat turned towards her husband as he clutches his throat. II is all women, soft-porn pin-ups surrounding a stark, full-frontal nude with pubic hair, all set against the landscape garden ...”

“... divided between Jews and goyim. If there was a plane crash and fifty people were killed, my Aunt Rose, the most conservative voice in my family, would scan the newspaper list of victims for Jewish names and exclaim: ‘What an unglick; six Jews died.’ All of my family had a special feeling for Jonas Salk or Albert Einstein that they did not have for ...”

“... non-regicides for rigorous punishment short of death. Milton’s name was floated briefly on 18 June, but not seconded; several of his powerful friends, including Marvell and Sir William Davenant, whom Milton had saved from execution as a Royalist conspirator under the Commonwealth, helped to rescue him. The recollection of images from Macbeth might also ...”

“... mirror up to them, in the tawdry and convoluted intrigues of The Jew of Malta, performed at the Rose Theatre in February 1592, a few weeks after his deportation from Flushing. So we have these two spies or projectors, these two Richards or Dicks, and their apparent recollections of Marlowe’s blasphemies. They closely corroborate one another on the ...”

“... harp that once through Tara’s halls’, ‘The Minstrel Boy’ and especially ‘The last rose of summer’. These songs were performed in concerts, and in the polite parlours and drawing rooms where Moore thought they belonged. ‘The Meeting of the Waters’ no doubt owed much of its popularity to the traditional air ‘The Old Head of Dennis’, to ...”

“... craving to meet artists. An event has been proposed: a celebration in the Sistine Chapel on 23 June with the pope and two hundred honoured guests, to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the contemporary and modern art collection at the Vatican Museums. I am somehow one of these two hundred; either that, or it is a trap. ‘I think if you’re invited to meet ...”

“... Writers’ Conference for the Defence of Culture’, held in Paris in June 1935. As a result of one of the Congress’s resolutions, Brecht, Lion Feuchtwanger, and Willi Bredel of the KPD, were appointed editors of Das Wort, a new German language periodical to be published in Moscow. For various reasons, some of them purely ...”

“... when one steps back. Oddly favourite is a portrait of the (unappealing) Pope Paul III in a faded rose-coloured cape enthroned on a worn velvet chair, the supreme pontiff just a lay figure there to demonstrate the painter’s skill with his materials. Next to him the irresistible portrait of the 12-year-old Ranuccio Farnese and another of Clarissa Strozzi ...”