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“... head, Tim Reilly, in an office with leather chairs and an oak dining table covered in a green baize cloth. ‘Lugovoi arrived with shopping bags … [and] steered the conversation round to tea. He suggested they all drink some, joking that the English had cups of tea all the time. Reilly declined and told them he’d just drunk water from the ...”

“... their way through the charred rubble of the Erechtheum, they were amazed to discover a fresh green shoot already 18 inches long, growing from the smoking remains of the sacred olive, Athena’s gift to the Athenians in an ancient auction for the city, a successful counter-bid against Poseidon’s unimaginative spring and the mother of all trees. Cuttings ...”

“... to the reader: A song on an oppressive night ... The moon is plating with bright Metal the dark-green cut-outs it has made. ... A song; like an echo, so alive Buried under bushes down the drive ... – If’s stopped: Look, he’s there, in the shade ... – A toad! – Why this fear and trembling With me here, your faithful conscript! See him, poet ...”

“... that she gave up her plans to work at the Oxford Mission among the factory girls of Bethnal Green. Her mother’s disapproval of her choice of an architect of uncertain social origins and a German name perhaps strengthened her resolve. (Lady Edith soon became close to her son-in-law, who designed her a wonderful house, Homewood, on the Knebworth ...”

“... from an underground labyrinth full of sepulchres. A centaur levels his arrow at a drowning man. A green devil with six bat’s wings and three gaping mouths clutches a pair of grimacing people. A horned figure labelled ‘Cerbero’, with cloven hooves, swollen balls and blood dripping from his lower jaw, forces two naked people to cower and topple. The ...”

“... impelled by her upbringing to become a socialist, and even to pass on the contagion to her son – Peter Benenson, founder of Amnesty International. Her book moves from the site of her father’s first oilfield to the site of her reforming achievements at Marks and Spencer. ‘What were my qualifications?’ she asks in her foreword. ‘A Russian soul, a ...”

“... towards anything that smacks of modernisation. Croucher spies on lovers, dyes his enemies’ milk green, stuffs potatoes up their exhaust pipes: he disguises himself as a pest officer, a Greek Orthodox priest, a knapsacked botanist, a video librarian (who can transform enthusiastic commercials into Buñuel-like fantasies of gluttony and nausea). Croucher ...”

“... that rural nostalgia has been the fuel of British economic decline. One of the many merits of Peter Mandler’s superb study is that it utterly demolishes these assumptions. He shows that, by Continental standards, Britain has been exceptionally slow to protect its country houses. Political intervention has been resisted and commercial development put ...”

“... most famous fool of the Tudor era seems to have arrived at court ‘out of nowhere’, in Peter Andersson’s words. Will Somer, the man who inspired Nashe’s ‘Summers’, was Sexton’s successor: he was taken on sometime before June 1535, when the royal wardrobe accounts first mention a set of new clothes for him, and perhaps as early as a decade ...”

“... Aga Khan had fallen in love with its wind-eroded granite shorelines, pink sandy coves and velvety green waters. He and a few investor friends bought 38 miles of coast and 13,000 hectares of land from the daughters of peasants in the area (the sons inherited the more fertile inland plots), hired five architects and built a resort town, Porto Cervo, more easily ...”

“... on as usual. Names central to Renaissance scholarship appear on page after page – Thomas More, Peter Giles, Martin Dorpius, Pirckheimer, Amerbach, Tunstall, Lascaris, Zazius. So do the names of people for whom Erasmus scholars feel especial warmth – Grocyn, say, or William Warham, the Archbishop of Canterbury, who put up with a great deal, for Erasmus ...”

“... ultimately be judged and defined by what he does.’ A journalist who may be closer to events, Peter Snowdon ends his book on a more equivocal note: ‘If the last four and a half years have been testing for Cameron’s Conservative Party,’ he writes, ‘the next few will be far harder, whether the party wins or loses.’ Not that Snowdon is in any doubt ...”

“... 16th, 17th and 18th centuries – was given to the museum by Lady Grantchester, the sister of Sir Peter Moores.To celebrate its twentieth anniversary, Compton Verney has mounted The Reflected Self: Portrait Miniatures, 1540-1850 (until 23 February). Spread across three large rooms, the exhibition tells the story of the portrait miniature in Britain using ...”

“... for Hillinus, a canon of Cologne. The dedication page shows Hillinus presenting the book to St Peter and, above the two men, an accurate image of the old Cologne Cathedral, which was built in the ninth century. (The illustration corresponds to the excavated remains of the foundation walls.) In Constance, the book is open to a full-page illumination of St ...”

“... of the child behind the man, Mandelson’s short-trousered induction into political life. Boy Peter on a Hovis bicycle! That was the madeleine moment in an interminable chronicle of not-saying, arcane rituals of grazing and trouser-changing unmatched since Roberto Rossellini made The Taking by Power by Louis XIV for French television. Triggered by an ...”