“... raid on Harper’s Ferry and its aftermath. In military terms, the event was a disaster. No slaves rose up to join Brown (in fact there weren’t very many in the mountains of what is now West Virginia, where the arsenal was located, far from the plantation belt). After commandeering weaponry, Brown abandoned his plan to retreat into the Alleghenies and fight ...”

“... best estimate of the amount of gold held by the Bank of England on a given future day. Circulation rose enormously because of canny publicity, and because entrants had to find five witnesses for their guess. Harmsworth was the one who made real money from the competition: the winner died of TB eight years later. He branched out into new publications, notably ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... barefoot or otherwise. I then went to see K. B. McFarlane. My special subject in Schools was Richard II so I had been to McFarlane’s lectures on the Lollard Knights; I also had a copy of some notes on his 1953 Ford Lectures that was passed down from year to year in Exeter. I knew of his austere reputation and of his reluctance to publish from David ...”

“... The last time was in Paris when we were having supper at Brasserie Bofinger. Bacon and his party rose to leave, whereupon all the waiters gathered in the window to watch the great man depart – something I could never imagine happening in London.14 February. Watch the beginning of A Matter of Life and Death on BBC2, where David Niven, having survived his ...”

“... to a fame that seemed to increase year by year almost regardless of his written efforts. Ellison rose up the celebrity ladder, but had no more secure social basis than he had possessed in his years of poverty. He had nothing, really, that could make him comfortable with the superior things he could do and knew he could do, except to try to do them at a ...”

“... least partly caused by forced collectivisation. But Brezhnev’s memoirs say nothing about it. He rose steadily to become director of the Dzerzhinsky metal plant, encouraging ‘shock workers’ to outdo the production targets set by the Five-Year Plan. Schattenberg defines him in the late 1930s as ‘a rather normal example of the new type of ...”

“... of him at the end of the 1980s was his undoing a decade later. By the time the US negotiator Richard Holbrooke met him days before the bombing began, there was no going back. Holbrooke told Milosevic, ‘It will start very soon after I leave,’ and Milosevic told Holbrooke: ‘There is nothing more I can say.’ The most intriguing aspect of the bombing ...”

“... new wave of furious proselytising for atheism (which includes not just Hitchens but people like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett) is just another surrogate religion is a familiar one. It’s what the God-botherers always say about the God-bashers. But in the case of Christopher Hitchens it’s not entirely convincing. The ...”

“... returned and clicked on the second column. Presently a thing like a solid grey-white cauliflower rose until it was a mountain covering all south Manhattan. This is how we bury you. It was the most open atrocity of all time, a simple demonstration written on the sky which everyone in the world was invited to watch. This is how much we hate you. Six thousand ...”

“... is famous for two things: her intense screen beauty and her many marriages (eight of them, two to Richard Burton). But at least as central to her life were her close and enduring friendships with men, some gay (like Rock Hudson), others heterosexual (like Farrell). Sometimes, Farrell took her to the Polo Lounge in the Beverly Hills Hotel, where she had been ...”

“... In 1979, in a preface to a new edition of Yeats: The Man and the Masks, Richard Ellmann wrote about 46 Palmerston Road in Rathmines in Dublin, where George Yeats lived between her husband’s death in 1939 and her own death almost thirty years later. Mrs Yeats lived, Ellmann wrote, among the dead poet’s papers. ‘There in the bookcases was his working library, often heavily annotated, and in cabinets and file cases were all his manuscripts, arranged with care … She was very good at turning up at once some early draft of a poem or play or prose work, or a letter Yeats had received or written ...”

“... scale. Jung the psychoanalyst was nearly as gifted as Jung the psychiatrist. And fittingly he rose to the same degree of pre-eminence in the new movement: editor of the first journal, official head of the International Psychoanalytic Association, gentile ‘son and heir’ of the man who had invented the procedure. But weaknesses began to show. Over the ...”

“... to build careers on the blacklist. The virus that would surface decades later, disguised as Richard Nixon or Ronald Reagan, began here. Fault lines in the American psyche are most obvious at the interface of showbiz saccharine and the political process: Monroe’s birthday tribute to JFK, Sinatra as MC at the Kennedy White House, late-liberal ...”