“... this year’). He got an A in Metalwork, but the teacher couldn’t think of his name and wrote ‘Robert’ while telling him to keep up the good work. His form teacher, Mr Norman, said that ‘Ronnie’s attitude and standard of work is slipping. I hope that he takes note of what has been said to him recently. He is always pleasant and happy.’ Ronnie ...”

“... with London, Liverpool, Hull, Southampton or nearby Coventry; it is one of the few places where it may be genuinely true that more of the built fabric was destroyed by ‘the planners’ than the Luftwaffe.The demiurge of Birmingham’s rebuilding wasn’t a planner at all, but the city’s chief engineer between 1935 and 1963, Herbert Manzoni. Distrustful of ...”

“... woman Brooke fell in love with was one who was going to remain out of reach for some time. In May 1908 he went to a Fabian supper party to which some grand guests had been invited, including the governor of Jamaica, Sir Sydney Olivier, who brought three of his four beautiful daughters (Laurence Olivier was their younger cousin). He already knew two of the ...”

“... could they be sure that a bullet would not – counter-productively – actually kill him? A clue may lie in the embarrassed admission of Chen’s security detail that, supposedly because it was a hot day, he was not wearing a bullet-proof vest, standard issue for a presidential incumbent on the campaign trail. An odd feature of the shooting was that aim was ...”

“... is classified ‘B’, meaning ‘no reason not to murder immediately’. Two weeks later, on 15 May 1944, he was one of 878 able-bodied men on Convoy 73, the only one of 79 convoys with no women or children, and the only one not headed for Auschwitz. It went to Kaunas in Lithuania. It is thought that the men were assigned to dig up and burn the bodies of ...”

“... as by her profile. She seems to be looking down at Patrick, though he’s a head taller. Hassall may have used the 1832 miniature by William Thomson of a 22-year-old Gaskell, or perhaps Richmond’s 1851 drawing (there isn’t as much difference between them as twenty years ought to make). She may have made Gaskell up ...”

“... office in an age of strongmen, between Margaret Thatcher’s first election victory in 1979 and Robert Mugabe’s in 1980. Thirty-six years later Dos Santos is still in power. Under his supervision, Angola is not just a development star, but a model of elite self-enrichment and wealth disparity. There are now said to be seven thousand millionaires while ...”

“... and the handsome profits made by Quaker companies like Barclay’s and Lloyd’s banks, Bryant and May matches, Swan Hunter shipbuilders and Cadbury itself. In Victorian Britain, Quaker businessmen had competitive advantages. Ron Davies, in his biography of George Stephenson (Quakers were early financiers of the railways), talks about a Quaker ‘moral ...”

“... execution; each sentence must be determined individually and according to rules. These standards may, in practice, be impossibly high and, once again, race is part of the reason. As every prosecutor and defence attorney would know, black jurors are far more likely to spare the lives of the accused than their white counterparts. Perhaps, as McFeely ...”

“... by tenants of temple lands, and rations of barley due to temple workers. These credits and debits may have been calculated in silver shekels, but coins hardly circulated at the time. In other words, of the three functions ascribed to money by economics textbooks – a medium of exchange, a unit of account and a store of value – it was the second that came ...”

“... opinions and rather narrow tastes. Nonetheless he was very good at teaching one how to write. He may have been wrong in some of his literary judgments and ignorant in some areas of literature but he was good at getting rid of what was superfluous or phoney in a piece of writing. And he would be very insulting if one came out with some bit of ...”

“... is the second part of a two-part interview. Part 1: ‘You Muddy Fools’ I want to ask you about Robert Lowell: as an influence on your work, that is, and only then as what he later became – a ‘Life’, the subject of your first full-length biography. You did and do admire him greatly as a poet, yet in his poetic practice didn’t he trample all over the ...”

“... five exemplars, and pictures their lives and their probable futures with dry wit and what readers may have felt was an unusually fine grasp of detail. His types hover somewhere between reportage and fiction, each showing a different reaction when offered a bath by their client in his ‘nicely furnished bachelor apartment’. Len ‘ungraciously accepts, on ...”

“... army, which was unhappy with the deal and thought it could get better terms. The next president, Robert Kocharyan, was more of a hardliner and refused to surrender the occupied provinces. For the Armenians, there was no way of legalising the status of the occupied regions, and they didn’t have the population required to settle the area. Yet they held on to ...”

“... inspector investigating a murder that has not yet taken place: he ends up killing the suspect, who may be his father. The critic Jean Cayrol read Les Gommes as an allegory about the German occupation and the French Resistance: ‘sadly,’ Robbe-Grillet later wrote, ‘I had been on the other side.’ Les Gommes won the Prix Fénéon and the admiration of ...”