“... the Party which had exiled and terrorised his people. He became an activist in the Komsomol, and rose to the Central Committee, that preparation ground for future leaders, qualifying for foreign travel and passing into the middle level of the nomenclatura. Switching from law to economics, he was accepted as a lecturer in the Plekhanov Institute of the ...”

“... the happy beam-hunter of 1940 and premier intelligencer thereafter (... and Science), Norman Rose (and Zionism) and Roy Jenkins (the Government of 1951-55) are predictably good. The uneven John Keegan (... ’s Strategy), though seemingly disqualified by his recent published confession that he cannot understand Clausewitz, nevertheless succeeds ...”

“... names of the Marlowes’ neighbours as if he were doffing his cap to them in the street: Alderman Rose the woollen-draper; Harmon Verson the immigrant glazier; Laurence Applegate the tailor, who spoke ‘bawdy words’ about Mistress Hurt; Goodman Shaw the basketmaker, into whose house John Marlowe stormed one evening in 1579 and said, ‘Michael Shaw thou ...”

“... not so made that ‘sweet effluvia darting through the brain’ could cause them to ‘die of a rose in aromatic pain’, but the advance of civilisation was proving him naive. However, the main impulse in this modified smell discourse (as one might now be encouraged to put it) was towards the practice of deodorisation, both of the body and the city. As to ...”

“... He did not give a damn about anything except zapping Communists. Nor did his chief supporter, Richard Perle, nicknamed ‘Prince of Darkness’, for his single-minded obsession with avenging his ancestors for what the Russian Reds did to them. Perle’s high moral tone reached its zenith when he recommended arms purchases from an Israeli firm which had ...”

“... the Goya portrait of Wellington, is a divorcee, and has a rather well-known collection of famille rose dishes. (Such things count for a lot in Brookner’s novels.) A lover of fine things, he proposes marriage to Edith. She accepts. But in a surprising climax things go wrong. This time, however, Edith takes charge of her own destiny, acting – at last ...”

“... sums up the issues between Keynes and Robertson with magisterial fairness and clarity. And Kenneth Rose reveals that Sir Frederic Hooper, the head of Schweppes, ‘detested the fizzy drinks upon which the prosperity of his firm depended’. One can only agree with that ‘poet, playwright, critic, editor and publisher’, T.S. Eliot (whose later life, ...”

“... fly. Lindsay excitedly crunches the numbers: ‘In the 30 years between 1975 and 2005, global GDP rose 154 per cent, while world trade grew 355 per cent. Meanwhile, the value of air cargo climbed an astonishing 1395 per cent. More than a third of all the goods traded in the world, some $3 trillion worth – but barely one per cent of its weight! – travels ...”

“... in the foreground, and behind him a small and rather startled bear on a leash. Morris and Rose Michtom, who ran a store in Brooklyn, created a novelty toy based on the cartoon – advertising it, with the president’s consent, as ‘Teddy’s Bear’. The bear Teddy did not shoot died anyway.There has been a lot of violence to disavow. Grizzlies loom ...”

“... history-aware viewer who registers also the dragon-vanquishing knight-cum-king, the fair English rose he’s redeeming, and the notional ‘poor folk’ who look on in hope of salvation, sharing the foreground with a hideous slough of dragon-chewed corpses. This heartfelt conservative fantasia was painted in the early 1630s. Charles’s grapples with the ...”

“... necessarily make them good composers, of course, but their standing and visibility in society rose and with it the standing of classical music more generally. The first organist at St Paul’s to receive a knighthood was John Goss, though he had to wait until his retirement in 1872. After that new organists often got one immediately. The pattern at the ...”

“... one slumped at the table, his head in his hands. For the first time in more than four hours, Ding rose from his chair and marched off to snack on some walnuts. A few minutes later, Gukesh offered his hand in resignation. The championship was suddenly set alight.The image of a chessboard with pieces in play contains a tangle of symbolic suggestions, many of ...”

“... is always the possibility that all the swooping and posing was shriekingly funny to watch, but Richard Murdoch, who was up in 1936 and much later made a solid contribution to the British humorous tradition with Much Binding in the Marsh, looked back on his Footlights days with a nostalgia well tempered by a sense of proportion. He said that they weren’t ...”

“... it deserves. Not much is known about the Russian Jews who fought on the Boer side, though several rose to significant rank; we find a Commandant Kaplan and a Commandant Isaac Herman, while two others, Josef Segal (‘Jackals’) and Wolf Jacobson (‘Wolf’), who acted as scouts, were legendary figures in their time; Segal became a special adviser and secret ...”

“... 1962’, in which a girl taking off her clothes at a bus-stop is suffering from the ‘Gypsy Rose [Lee] virus’. Although Davis strings us along for a page, this bit is from a 1952 Robert Heinlein novella. One hundred million house mice did indeed overrun the Southern Californian town of Taft in 1926, and the picture of ‘Federal men killing ...”