“... he warned. ‘The wave of population will break upon that shore, and roll back upon itself.’ John Maynard Keynes, who made no secret of his admiration for Malthus, attributed the First World War and the Russian Revolution to overpopulation and global competition for food. The ‘great acceleration’ of the second half of the 20th century, a period of ...”

“... and he wasn’t the only violent misogynist at large on the island. There was her former classmate John Stickney, a bomb enthusiast who blew himself up while stalking his ex-girlfriend. There was her near neighbour, George Waterfield Russell Jr, aka the Eastside Killer, who was apprenticing as a prowler and peeping Tom during the same period, before killing ...”

“... on municipal politics. After he was elected mayor in 1873, his administration took over the private gas and water companies which had failed to provide clean water and reliable heating – ‘a degree of state intervention that was not to be carried out at a national level until after 1945’. (In the thick of the takeover Chamberlain, who ...”

“... on, and worse, a civil war, and though it has often been both dicey and impractical. The election took place as scheduled on 8 November 1864, even though during the summer Lincoln had feared he might lose it (whether it would have taken place if he had still feared he might lose in November is another question). The election ...”

“... a visionary monologue notionally addressed to a love-object, though her reality is pretty foggy. John Stuart Mill read the poem attentively in preparation for a review which never appeared, although Browning did later get to see his notes and was understandably struck by one of Mill’s sharper comments: ‘The writer seems to me possessed with a more ...”

“... I do feel there is this core of darkness and nasty things. I don’t know where it came from. It took me many years to recognise that it was there and that it could be controlled. I find that I can just write with greater emotion and depth if I take these things from myself. It’s not that I step down and want Lew to be a figurehead, an avatar of ...”

“... how this revolution changed Europe and the world.For many participants, in memory the revolutions took on a stark emotional chiaroscuro: the bright euphoria of the early days, and then the frustration, bitterness and melancholy that came when the ‘iron net’ of counter-revolution (as the Berliner Fanny Lewald put it) descended on the insurgent ...”

“... a speculation about a particular memory as a 70th birthday gift. The memory concerned a trip Freud took to Athens with his brother, and his own ‘curious thought’ at the sight of the Acropolis: ‘So this all really does exist, just as we learned in school!’ Freud describes himself as two people, one making the comment and the other perceiving it: and ...”

“... by William Manchester, better known for his account of the assassination of his wartime friend, John F. Kennedy, Death of a President. Written in a racy, sometimes sensational style, the book was full of sweeping generalisations about Germany and the Germans, whom Manchester, not least because of his war experiences, clearly did not like. The Krupps were ...”

“... Weight puts it in the first subheading of his introduction: ‘Amphetamines, Jean-Paul Sartre and John Lee Hooker’. Which is a nice phrase, even if it’s half-inched from an interviewee in a previous book, Jonathon Green’s flawless oral history of 1960s counterculture, Days in the Life. (In fact Green also used it as a subheading. This feels a bit ...”

“... theology” clergy.’ Aristide’s elevation from slum priest to presidential candidate took place against a background of right-wing death squads and threatened military coups. He rose quickly in the eyes of Haitians, but his stock plummeted in the United States. The New York Times, which relies heavily on informants who can speak English or ...”

“... a stand on wildlife protection. The clientele assumed she had fallen in love with him. Morel then took to the bush and launched a vigilante campaign involving assaults on ivory traders, a manifesto inserted at gunpoint into a local newspaper, and the public spanking of a famous big game huntress. In time his campaign caught the world’s imagination, the ...”

“... the ladylike prescriptions of my upbringing, tilts into something quite other. Is that quality I took to be heroic self-possession a far more conventional, ladylike demureness, even complacency? Is there something smug and placid in those hands clasped at her waist?What I had thought was a watercolour turns out to be a lithograph from a chalk drawing with ...”

“... There is often a vacancy to his acting, which can give the illusion of mystery. The producer John Foreman recalled that Newman’s second wife, Joanne Woodward, once said to him: ‘If you think he’s thinking something, he’s not always thinking something.’In Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Newman hardly moves his eyes when he speaks – only his mouth. We ...”

“... serving as a junior spy in Moscow. When asked by Gorbachev, who was on his way to a meeting with John Major, what he did for a living, he claims to have answered: ‘I follow you very closely.’ Alas, the formulation he includes in the text, ‘Я следую вас очень близко,’ is a clumsily literal translation that makes little grammatical ...”