“... the horror. No sooner had Scotland failed to qualify than I was moved to treat my friends to John Steinbeck’s comment to Jacqueline Kennedy: ‘You talked of Scotland as a lost cause,’ he said, ‘and that is not true. Scotland is an unwon cause.’ Bloody hell. Better make mine a double. Five minutes later I was thinking about Ireland and five ...”

“... what you can, control what you can’t,’ has proved congenial for different reasons to John Major and Tony Blair, and to Blair’s heir apparent, Gordon Brown. These men are to Jenkins Thatcher’s political ‘sons’, with David Cameron trotting along behind as a ‘grandson’. (The book was completed before Cameron’s Conservatives abandoned ...”

“... he issued the reminder, Wolfowitz’s hopes of becoming secretary of state in a second Bush term took a nosedive. Marshall wondered whether we are ‘trying to get retribution toward these countries by stiffing them on the contracts’, or ‘trying to come to some sort of agreement . . . to refinance and restructure Iraq’s mammoth foreign debt’? As if ...”

“... I believe that Greene was surprised by what he found in Yonda. Here disease rather than sin took precedence. ‘The priests are more concerned with engineering, electricity, navigation and the like, than with the life of man or God,’ Greene wrote in Congo Journal. Querry ‘has come seeking another form of love and is faced with electric turbines and ...”

“... feminist and other good causes. Yet claims of this kind can distort the fiction itself. When Mrs John Dashwood, at the beginning of the novel, rudely asserts her right to the succession of the Dashwood property, and persuades her husband to drop his plan to give £7000 to the dispossessed girls, the method by which she achieves her purpose has more to do ...”

“... society’s early members included David Cecil, Roger Fry, J.B.S. Haldane, Julian Huxley, Augustus John, Keynes, Shaw, St Loe Strachey, Ellen Terry and Wells. Stories appeared in the press about ‘the big cars, the women in striking hats, the well-known Bloomsbury figures making themselves conspicuous in the audience with their unconventional dress and loud ...”

“... I recently​ took part in a research project prompted by the government-sponsored campaign of 2013, when Theresa May was home secretary, in which vans carried billboards bearing the words ‘In the UK illegally? Go home or face arrest.’ In order to understand how such a thing as that billboard could have come about, we felt we needed some insight into the mindset of the Home Office and its officials ...”

“... Around​ forty years ago, a friend of mine took his own life in the middle of a party he was throwing in his apartment. A neighbour who happened to look outside saw him climb onto the window ledge, hesitate briefly and then jump to his death from the fifth floor. His guests were stunned when the police rang at the door ...”

“... secure a majority in a Northern Irish parliament. Sinn Féin won 27 seats to the DUP’s 28, and took three of Fermanagh’s five seats, deposing Foster’s DUP colleague Lord Morrow. The results gave a considerable boost to the parties opposed to Brexit.Thirty thousand people cross the Irish border every day for work. Farmers in the border areas rely ...”

“... Truman as president and inherited the Mossadegh problem. The new administration – which included John Foster Dulles as secretary of state and his brother Allen, now director of the CIA – largely endorsed the views of the outgoing team. In a memo written at the beginning of March assessing the situation in Iran, Allen Dulles advised Eisenhower that ‘a ...”

“... composition by the Florentine painter Andrea del Sarto, showing the Virgin and Child with St John the Baptist. The original has been in Rome since about 1790, possibly much earlier, and many copies are recorded. The image beneath the portrait is somewhat smaller than the one in Rome. It is known that in 1517 Sarto painted a picture of an unspecified ...”

“... union will never be the same again. A saucy genie of empowerment has escaped from the bottle. As John Curtice wrote in the Herald in July, ‘all the lives of everyone in Scotland have been affected by the devolved government in a way they’ve frankly not been in the previous 21 years of devolution.’ The Anglo-Scottish union was under new strain ...”

“... be sure. Emperor Domitian tortured flies; Louis XI did the same to stags; Archduke Franz Ferdinand took pride in having killed more than half a million animals, including the 2150 pieces of small game he bagged in one day and the 3000th stag he shot shortly before Gavrilo Princip shot him. Through the centuries, in Britain and across Europe, cats had the ...”

“... even though he ‘read every pertinent document in every available archive’.But then, in 2011, John Tofik Karam, a young scholar working on the Arab diaspora in Brazil, published a piece in Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies. Karam had come across the Paraguay programme while researching Arab migrations to South America. He was relieved to hear ...”

“... We located her on our passive sonar and sighted her visually early in the afternoon of 1 May. We took up a position astern, and followed the General Belgrano for over thirty hours. We reported we were in contact with her. Gavshon and Rice in fact assert that Conqueror first picked up Belgrano on signals before 1600 hours on Friday 30 April, and that she ...”