“... and greeted Henry Kissinger with bear hugs and heavy jokes. When the president came to Moscow in May 1974, he found Brezhnev ‘like a big Irish labour boss’, backslapping at one moment and at the next bellowing with anger (for the benefit of listeners in Hanoi) about the Vietnam War. Here and at Camp David, Nixon was a ...”

“... and that the offender would be sacked. That’s the language of the new Fleet Street tycoons. David Astor, the former editor of the Observer, wrote in a letter to the Times: ‘To allow a newspaper catering to political sector X of our community to be taken over by a proprietor who is a militant member of political sector Y is, plainly, not in the ...”

“... from Paris, about 150 km upstream, and the river had been swollen for a while. People in Paris may have been nervous, but by and large they put their trust in news from the national Hydrometric Service. Agents working for the service usually sent reports from their stations by cable, but on 20 January water breaking over the banks of the Loing had brought ...”

“... Woodrow Wyatt later gloated that he had fixed this as go-between from Murdoch to Thatcher, and he may have been right. As soon as he had the papers, Murdoch began rearranging their editors, with Evans shunted from Sunday to daily, a mistake in itself, and telling them what to do, and what to write. At the time Evans pretended that Murdoch didn’t dictate ...”

“... out on – is the principal theme of the next two instalments, Falling towards England (1985) and May Week Was in June (1990). Written as his TV fame reached its peak, these books – scrappier than the first, and more ingratiatingly flip – get less enjoyable as qualities he’s prouder of start falling into place. Part of the problem with instalments two ...”

“... prostitutes and taking endless shots of dusty people unable to get up off the pavement. I may be alone in disliking this series. At any rate, Cartier-Bresson’s various visits to Mexico were considered fruitful enough to merit a discrete volume (Mexican Notebooks, 1995). But compared to the work of Mexican photographers – Manuel and Lola Álvarez ...”

“... abuses, let alone the Rabaa massacre or the mass imprisonment and torture of dissidents. When David Cameron held a meeting with Sisi in New York in September he spoke of ‘Egypt’s pivotal role in the region’ and its importance to British policy. ‘Both economically and in the fight against Islamist extremism’, he said, Egypt was a crucial ally and ...”

“... George VI​ was crowned on 12 May 1937, a hundred years, less six weeks, after his great-grandmother Victoria succeeded to the throne. At 18 the new queen had been full of confidence. Her first action was to move her bed out of her mother’s room and have Sir John Conroy, her mother’s intimate adviser, banished from court ...”

“... sinister ones. Sent to bed while one of his older cousins read aloud from the first instalment of David Copperfield, he managed to hide himself and listen breathlessly – only to give the game away when he burst into loud sobs of sympathy ‘under the strain of the Murdstones’. The small James surrendered with equal readiness to the magic of the ...”

“... Moscow, where he cultivated a Byronic image and gained a reputation for insolence. He fell in with David Burlyuk, a Cubist painter who recognised his poetic talent, and the two of them got together with the avant-garde poets Velimir Khlebnikov and Aleksei Kruchenykh to release the first Futurist almanac, A Slap in the Face of Public Taste. They announced that ...”

“... known as ‘rockets’, moving in a single direction with no prospect of a return journey.Museveni may have opened the door, but the constitution of 1995 entrenched the barrier against citizenship for non-indigenous applicants, who now had to belong to an indigenous group. Schedule 3 of the constitution included a list of ‘indigenous’ tribes. By this ...”

“... listening posts and much of the signals intelligence they collect. A reader of a Five Eyes brief may not know which state has collected the information they’re looking at without consulting the technical data. The NSA is by far the most powerful signals intelligence agency in the world, but global surveillance is a shared effort of the Anglosphere.The ...”

“... Boston University. The first of them, a satirical attack on The Old Faith and the New, a work of David Strauss’s dotage (1871, English translation 1873), begins with a memorable disclaimer. The German public’s eagerness to infer from the military victory over France a victory over French culture, Nietzsche writes, is a pernicious delusion, ‘not simply ...”

“... a low standard of living – unacceptable. In the UK at that time – happy days – there may have been shortages of food and clothing, but there was also an acute shortage of labour. The so-called ‘flood of immigration’ started, first from the Caribbean and then, in the late Fifties and early Sixties, from the sub-continent of India. The numbers ...”

“... hostility towards Europe, which only reinforced the wider electorate’s allergy to what Theresa May described, when she was party chairman, as the – perceived – ‘nasty party’. But did any leader or electoral strategist really have much room for manoeuvre? Bale is acutely sensitive to the ways in which previous choices and established institutional ...”