“... had acquaintances in the literary world (her correspondents included H.G. Wells, Bryher, H.D. and John Cowper Powys), most of her life was lived in obscurity, and her friendships were mainly epistolary ones. Her aversion to having her picture taken and her reluctance to submit to interviews (she believed that readers should ‘keep their illusions’ about ...”

“... that march, another handsome man in a leather coat came to the place where they were resting and took all the young children away. Pearl supposed the children were killed until a few months ago, when she saw a documentary on television about Raoul Wallenberg and recognised him as the man in the leather coat. ‘I screamed when I saw a picture of him. Those ...”

“... to kindle his innate intelligence. Shortly after becoming heir to the Melbourne title in 1805, he took the unstable Caroline Ponsonby as wife – or, more accurately, she took him as husband. From the beginning, he seemed henpecked: on the occasion of his first big Parliamentary speech in 1806, she visited the Commons ...”

“... with the gloss of apparent spontaneity. Working on this material with them was their producer, John Ammonds, the man who persuaded Morecambe to trust the camera, to play to it with his asides and use it as a mirror for his idiot grin. The other member of the team, their new writer Eddie Braben, was only rarely present. While Hills and Green had entered ...”

“... a gaggle of ducks into the heated swimming-pool. In 1969 he and Celia holidayed in Marbella with John Aspinall’s half-sister, Jennifer ... In London he spent every night in clubs like the Aretusa, the Speakeasy, Tramps and Yours or Mine ... He holidayed in Marrakech with Paul Getty’s wife, Tahlita, Christopher Gibb (close friend and mentor of Mick Jagger ...”

“... to bolster the movie’s plot – the future Tammany Hall boss William M. Tweed, Archbishop John Hughes and the showman P.T. Barnum – are either transported backwards in time or engage in alliances with gangs that defy the actual marginality of these gangs within the class and power structure of the mid-century city. As for Gangs of New York’s ...”

“... and Eurocentric perspective’ date from the first half of the last century. Set against, say, John Elliott’s concept of a ‘multiple monarchy’ (Elliott is absent even from Kamen’s bibliography which, given his enormous influence, is difficult to account for) or Serge Gruzinski’s writings on mestisaje (also absent) which depict the Empire as not ...”

“... the final few months of his stretch. It was an unlikely career for a novelist, though Braly, who took a dim view of his success, never seemed surprised, certain that his fate had been forecast from the start. His father ran a West Coast automobile agency in the 1920s, a blue-chip business that folded with the Crash. Braly was five years old; in no time he ...”

“... the biographies, the inexplicable determination of Kenneth Branagh (of Shackleton) to out-act John Mills (of Scott of the Antarctic), the retellings of modern legends about the explorers freezing and dying and writing poetry as they did so. But Tromsø is almost empty. There seem to be hardly any tourists, though I am told by a smiling woman in the ...”

“... in 1781, and that of the 5000 inhabitants exposed to infection, 99.5 per cent caught the disease. John Enders and his young associate T.C. Peebles were the first to grow measles virus in the test tube in 1954, using the tissue culture techniques developed by Enders and his colleagues in the late 1940s. Much good that did him at Harvard. Even though he was ...”

“... Pasteur in Paris with Simone-Henriette-Charlotte Kaminker (later the actress Simone Signoret) and took a degree in philosophy from the Sorbonne. At 24 he joined the Resistance with the Communist Francs-Tireurs, who sent him to the US to train as a parachutist. In 1947, he joined the journal Esprit, where he met Resnais and André Bazin. He ...”

“... him, was a lone voice. A huge industry of hunters and traders lay behind the Roman excesses, and took its toll: lions effectively disappeared from North Africa, tigers and elephants from Persia and the rest of Western Asia. The Old Testament launched the Judaeo-Christian tradition on a different course that was equally unfortunate. The notion that God had ...”

“... state.) Stern’s ancestors on both sides were among the great and the good. One, Sigismund Asch, took part in the 1848 revolution, was jailed for his liberal commitment, and went on to become a city councillor in Breslau and a revered citizen. He took special care to treat the indigent in his medical practice. One of ...”

“... in what appears to have been an effort to remove witnesses from the scene before the crime took place. Cell phone transmission was interrupted to prevent the circulation of photos and videos. The result, in Israel and the US, has been an astonishingly sanitised war, in which, in a bizarre attempt at ‘balance’, the highly inaccurate rocket attacks ...”

“... the favour when, one foggy evening, he found me wandering, homeless, in Swiss Cottage, and took me home with him to Queen Anne Street, where he had a spare room at the back. At first, badly needing refuge, I swallowed Harry’s fiction that the youngsters of military age and their occasional girlfriends, lying around, making love or sleeping in the ...”