“... detail and no quarrelling with the evidence. If the report says subject X showed up in place Y on day Z, in it goes, even if you know subject X had been buried in a distant city a month before. That report, as given, means something and you can never know what, for sure, until the end of time, if then. The central thing to understand is the primacy of ...”

“... fret with a sense of missed opportunity throughout a long retirement. On the evening of Christmas Day, after Ferguson had fallen asleep in front of the TV, they held a meeting and decided to take him on. ‘In the kitchen,’ he writes, ‘a mutiny was brewing.’ The conspirators emerged into the open to confront him. ‘The chief rebel came in and kicked my ...”

“... Council are on the staff of the IISS. Until he stepped down in July, Chatham House was led by Robin Niblett, who spent time at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. RUSI’s director-general, Karin von Hippel, was once chief of staff to the four-star American general John Allen. In 2021, RUSI’s second largest donor was the US ...”

“... of Peacock Pie is taken from ‘The Song of the Mad Prince’, which reworks ‘Who Killed Cock Robin?’:Who said, ‘Peacock Pie’?      The old King to the sparrow:Who said, ‘Crops are ripe’?      Rust to the harrow:Who said, ‘Where sleeps she now?      Where rests she now her head,Bathed in eve’s loveliness’? –      That’s ...”

“... of Congresses, built at a truly frantic rate by the Chinese, who ran 24-hour shifts, working all day in the pitiless heat and then all night by floodlight. The Guineans gawped at such efforts (which they would never have dreamt of making themselves), but took the fact of competition in their stride. There was even a period when Mongolia entered the ...”

“... the movement to ‘reform’ them turned the endowment to providing relatively cheap fee-paying day schools for the middle class, with pressure groups making sure that fees were not so low as to encourage a large artisan entry. Parts of the original endowments were used to provide bursaries for those who wished to go to university. A few boys from the ...”

“... of the divide, or oscillating between them, often referring to herself as two separate people, by day a woman in society, by night a man writing into the early hours. In any event, Sand did not drop her pseudonym when, before long, her cover was blown, but instead revelled in her double identity. In 1833 she had a brief affair with the actress Marie Dorval ...”

“... hands. To be fair, there were some men she liked. They tended to be showbusiness people. She liked Robin Williams, Charlie Chaplin, Tommy Lee Jones and Al Pacino. She also liked Salinger. (‘Jerry’ had been a friend since the 1950s and Lillian could sometimes sound like a female Holden Caulfield, railing against the phonies.) She got a fine awareness of ...”

“... optimism proved to be ill-founded. The proletariat did not live up to expectations, leaving latter-day Marxists scrambling to find alternative superheroes. Hence, according to MacIntyre, the multitudes of ‘conflicting … political allegiances which now carry Marxist banners’, all expressing a well-founded hatred of capitalism but none offering a ...”

“... as ‘this city of Calvinism, high teas and loveless alliances’. It was on ‘the first day of the second month of the last year of the First World War, a Friday’ (i.e. 1 February 1918). The Cambergs were Jewish. After a schooling very much in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie vein, Muriel made the disastrous decision (she was only nineteen) to marry ...”

“... Pop Goes the Easel. Shown as part of the arts series Monitor in 1962, it purported to follow a day in the life of four young artists: Boty, Peter Blake, Derek Boshier and Peter Phillips. For Mellor, growing up in ‘meagre’ circumstances in the East Midlands, London as the Sixties started to swing was a revelation, ‘a vision of something ...”

“... narrative invention, such as why it matters so much whether Batman told the whole truth to valiant Robin, given that he would be killed instantly either way – or why the sinless Sinon wants in on the scheme, if the sack of Troy was as bad as the movie wants to suggest. Odysseus’ lie to Sinon doesn’t start the Trojan War, and the Trojans would presumably ...”

“... as the murderer of a great and courageous feminist poet. In 1972 the American poet and activist Robin Morgan published Monster, a book that included a piece in which a gang of Plath aficionados are imagined castrating Hughes, stuffing his penis into his mouth and then blowing out his brains. In Britain a militant anti-Hughes faction took to chiselling his ...”

“... Forster forged a famously durable relationship with the Buckinghams, was godfather to their son Robin (who died of Hodgkin’s disease in 1962), and chose to die at their house in Coventry. ‘I have never so known anyone before,’ he writes in 1943, and marvels that Bob ‘has been living and moving against me for 13 years’. So he confounded his earlier ...”

“... are answerable – politically to Parliament, legally to the courts. That the government of the day has no separate sovereignty in this paradigm is both axiomatic and a reminder of the sharpest of all the lessons of Eastern Europe: that it is when state is collapsed into party that democracy founders. To assume a jurisdiction of this kind is of course to ...”