“... more depressingly, as I am able to tell it. The least of its inaccuracies are the dates, which I took from My Life in CIA: they are only slightly wrong. There are far more alarming errors in every sentence. Take, for example, the phrase ‘he had been befriended by Georges Perec.’ I chose the word ‘befriended’ because the Harry Mathews in my ...”

“... two heroes stand marooned in their Beatness on that sunlit hill, ‘a devilish look, and he never took his eyes off mine for a long time. I looked back and blushed ... we would stick together and be buddies till we died.’ Spelling out the significance of this for the legend, Campbell notes that ‘theirs is a platonic love, though bedecked by romantic ...”

“... microscope, he carved and painted sculptures measurable in microns and millimetres; his Pope John Paul IIholds a cross crafted from a hair divided into sixths, making its width slightly less than the diameter of two red blood cells. His portrait of Little Red Riding Hood, whose diminutive has never been so well-deserved, features a mere speck of a girl ...”

“... will be no one but soldiers and bandits. Jorge Luis Borges, ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ John Bagot Glubb, a young lieutenant bearing wounds from the war in France, arrived in Mesopotamia in 1920. His assignment was to command armed patrols through the desert of what would become, under its first Western occupier, Iraq. The British bureaucracy, he ...”

“... 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 ...”