“... 75th birthday is approaching, and a historic summit is planned between the Führer and President Joseph Kennedy, as nearly twenty years of Cold War between the world’s two superpowers look set to thaw. And then the corpse of Josef Bühler, the one-time state secretary of the General Government, washes up in a lake on the outskirts of Berlin. Xavier ...”

“... de Janeiro in 1817 to study and collect the native fauna, he was sponsored by his King: Maximilian Joseph of Bavaria was, Juniper tells us, ‘a bird collector in his own right’ and hoped that Spix ‘would bring him novel and unique prizes’ from the expedition. Rare birds, and especially parrots, had been kept, at least since the Romans, as what we would ...”

“... was a provincial, from Figeac in the South-West, whose brains and ambition eventually drew him north, in the best Napoleonic tradition, to Paris and the Collège de France. He was first smitten with ancient Egypt, and the hieroglyphs that gave it so literally graphic a fascination, when he was a small boy. At the age of 11, having moved to Grenoble, he got ...”

“... I opened the boxes and examined the pieces in the hope of making the games feel less forgotten. Joseph Butler said in a sermon that self-deception promotes our deepest guilt ‘for it is a corruption of the whole moral character in its principle’. Franzen, overwhelmed by his blindness to others’ feelings, now helplessly projects feeling onto ...”

“... voyage to Australia, beckoned by the National Gallery of Victoria, which he had advised, and by Joseph Burke of Melbourne University, who believed that Clark would stimulate cultural interests in his compatriots. Clark wrote a contrite and affectionate note to his first wife, Jane, assuring her that there would be no more ‘silly fits’. This curious ...”

“... than Otto Dix, George Grosz or Max Beckmann, let alone the wild men of the 1970s and 1980s such as Joseph Beuys or Anselm Kiefer.It helped that Hitler’s personal distaste for Nolde’s work is well attested. His paintings featured prominently in the exhibition of degenerate art that opened in Munich in July 1937, and from 1941 until the end of the war he was ...”

“... subjects of his onomastic play (‘afrege’, ‘Grice-told’, ‘eQuine’); the name Alfred North Whitehead is deemed ‘unfortunate’. At one point in Percival Everett by Virgil Russell, a small girl who is asked to identify herself says: ‘My name is Name. My name is my name and the name of the word name and Name, my name.’ The response to this is ...”

“... an extra 3d for Poets’ Corner and the nave, and an extra shilling for the royal tombs and north transept. These days it’ll cost you £25, plus another £4.50 for the Queen Elizabeth Diamond Jubilee Galleries (worth it, in my opinion, for the effigy of Nelson and another from 1686 of Charles II in one of his own outfits). This makes it, by my ...”

“... of Portmeirion, the hotel he built as a partly cliff-hanging, partly tree-nestled village on a North Wales coastal estuary, adding to it building by building across some fifty years. Always astonishing, some think beautiful, it enjoyed its greatest publicity as the setting for the cult TV series, The Prisoner. But this kind of showy reputation is not ...”

“... on the books he wishes he’d written. The first section is on the Cambridge scholar and scientist Joseph Needham, microbiologist and expert on China, a man who fascinates Steiner and whom he wanted to write about in Frank Kermode’s Modern Masters series, published in the 1970s. Steiner had first seen Needham at a protest meeting against Anglo-American ...”

“... question that the Red Army wanted answered above all: had the Japanese, already occupying much of North China, any designs on the far eastern provinces of the Soviet Union? The job of a part-time correspondent, or stringer, for a grain newspaper would open few Japanese doors, so Sorge gamely returned to Germany to pick up more accreditations. He waded through ...”

“... give away a million boys’ lives in blood and pain’. Senators from Idaho, Montana and North Dakota called for her to be investigated as a ‘British agent’. How else to explain her comment, during the Battle of Britain, that if ‘democracy perishes in Britain, it will not be because the British people did not fight Hitler with all they had; it ...”

“... near the UN building and Ralph Bunche public schools dotted across the land – including one just north of Manhattan’s Morningside Park, four blocks from my office. But Bunche is no longer a household name, and while the children entering that school can surely tell you something about Martin Luther King Jr, and probably about Malcolm X too, I wonder what ...”

“... the population answered the call of the muezzin. Far away to the west, Sindh, Baluchistan and the North-West Frontier were overwhelmingly Muslim. But, conquered late by Britain, they were a rural backwater dominated by local notables who did not speak Urdu and felt no allegiance to the League, which had scarcely any organisational presence in them. In two of ...”

“... Frend, George Dyer, John Thelwall, Basil Montagu, John Tweddell, Felix Vaughan, James Losh, Joseph Fawcett. Roe’s research has been strenuous, his attention to detail earnest, and his book will be useful. But it will not be quite as useful as the book which he intended to write, which would have brought poetic text and historical context into dialogue ...”