“... by a Thai Communist hit squad in Bangkok later that year. How much​ did the British know? John Davis, the Force 136 man who was closest to Chin Peng, Lai Tek’s successor as MCP leader, had been in the prewar Special Branch. He knew the secret of Mr Wright, but did not tell his comrade. Anyway, the end of the war brought a new situation. In Indochina ...”

“... singular clarity on this subject never immunised him against narcotics. The apomorphine cure he took in Britain, touted in Junky as his final release from hell, was in reality short-lived, but it persisted as an article of faith in the legend spun around him. When, around 1980, he slipped into permanent relapse (which, after moving to Kansas from New ...”

“... are vampires, with little ultra-patriotic bite marks on their necks. The early symptoms often took the form of harmless scepticism about the protests in Ukraine and whether they were genuine. ‘Who is behind the Maidan?’ people would write, or they’d say: ‘Those poor Ukrainians are being taken for a ride.’ Soon the conspiracy-mongering got ...”

“... the Americans pulled out in 2011, and at the start of this year, under Baghdadi’s leadership, took over most of two towns which the US had made huge efforts to secure: Fallujah and Ramadi. These were major symbolic victories that helped establish Baghdadi’s reputation as the world’s foremost jihadi leader. Unlike al-Qaida’s Zawahiri, he was winning ...”

“... at all’ is the shell of the settled family man and paediatrician he was before the crisis that took away his regular, suburban life. When, in the final episode, it’s all over, TMWOA found and Kimble exonerated, a reporter asks him what his plans are, now that he’s free and no one is after him. ‘See some of my family and get back to work,’ he ...”

“... had settled in South London she was a regular visitor to the Tooting Granada, where her father took her with him to whatever was showing, thereby introducing her to some productively unsuitable material. But it was not just the films. The cinema itself made a permanent impression. Like its sister Granada in Woolwich, the Tooting branch has a fabulous ...”

“... emails, is strikingly similar to the message dropped through the letterboxes of Pepys Road in John Lanchester’s novel Capital – ‘We Want What You Have’.) Lasdun’s parents were Jews who converted to the C of E, and Nasreen’s communications quickly became virulently anti-semitic: ‘Do you have to be the stereotype of a Jew, James?’; ‘I ...”

“... greyhound breeder, pioneering aviator, nationalist warmonger and proto-Fascist demagogue (‘the John the Baptist of Fascism’, as an early, Mussolini-sponsored biography styled him), he was certainly an all-rounder, and perhaps one shouldn’t complain if mild-mannered wallflower is not also on the list. ‘You must make your own life, as you make a work ...”

“... John Singer Sargent has often been accused of lacking a soul. Even Henry James, who helped introduce him to the London scene in the 1880s and continued to promote his work, worried that he suffered from a ‘sort of excess of cleverness’. The fact that Sargent catered to a transatlantic clientele of celebrities and nouveaux riches at the height of the Gilded Age only encouraged the imputations of superficiality ...”

“... global economy, such as tea, silk, porcelain and printed calicoes. After the European economies took off decisively in the 19th century, it became plausible for the first time to propagate the myth of China’s epochal stagnation. During the Great Exhibition of 1851, Charles Dickens and Richard Horne wrote a piece for Household Words that contrasted the ...”

“... are not the ones that the champions of the rich sometimes like to suggest. As Barbara and John Ehrenreich point out in their essay in the Occupy Handbook, ‘for decades the most stridently promoted division within the 99 per cent was between what the right calls the liberal elite – composed of academics, journalists, media figures etc – and ...”

“... for New Zealand in 1937. The Open Society and Its Enemies, published in 1945, made him famous. He took a job at the LSE, where he remained for the rest of his life – Soros was one of his students there. Before this, his reputation had rested mainly on his Logik der Forschung (1934), in which he gave an account of explanation and claimed to have found a way ...”

“... more mocking posture, in another century and in another country, assumed by the American president John Adams: “It will never be pretended that any person employed . . . had interviews with the gods, or was in any degree under the inspiration of Heaven.”’ Wittreich spends the rest of the paragraph glossing Adams, and then moves on. Notice how his ...”

“... grave in the churchyard at Longtown, on the Anglo-Scottish border north of Carlisle. She took very ill the least suggestion that there might be some doubt about its authenticity. Much of the phenomenon must be ascribed to Geoffrey of Monmouth. Born some thirty years after the Norman Conquest, Geoffrey, with his Norman name and strong Welsh ...”

“... just as overloaded, pulling into Valletta from Benghazi and heavy with men looking for work. I took a seat on the wooden benches of the first-class section. Over in the VIP lounge, the Chinese businessmen from my flight were relaxing over an ample supply of alcohol. But we had entertainment too, flickering across a small TV screen: a dramatic re-enactment ...”