“... were four gommoni on the water, within minutes of the Italian beaches. The lieutenant at the helm took his speed up to about 45 knots, flipping the boat over the waves. Garbled co-ordinates, crumbling with static, came through from the base radio. After a surge of movement that brought us within a kilometre of the coast, we slowed up and hung in the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... States has a right to dictate what happens in Cuba can be traced as far back as the presidency of John Quincy Adams, when conventional wisdom held that Spain’s dominion over Cuba would inevitably give way to the island’s incorporation into the United States. ‘It’s in the neighbourhood’s interest that Cuba be free,’ Bush said when he introduced the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... no respectable architect could build anything with a clear conscience, Koolhaas ridiculed what he took as the sentimentality and impotence of architects whose only response to the tidal wave of business parks and mega-malls overwhelming the globe was to retreat into an autistic obsession with the precision with which doors could be fitted into walls, or the ...”

“... or Otaheite’. The same October week that Grace scrawled out ‘crisis’, loyalist fortunes took a desperate turn when Cornwallis surrendered to the Americans at Yorktown, sealing Britain’s defeat. Within a matter of months, British forces began withdrawing. The Galloways’ predicament was replayed in loyalist households across America. What would ...”

“... sympathies (in spite of my official views generally) are against the coup’ – but he took no stand against the junta. With all the praise for A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water, there came a few catcalls. Too many epithets, too many magnificent landscapes. And what sort of footsore traveller was this, who spent so many nights ...”

“... Purrrfect!’ That was last summer, and new brutalism in academia was taking on another meaning. I took my Californian friend inside, to get a feel of the hessian-clad walls; the cloth is a little frayed by now, but the décor still gave off aromas of patchouli, Nesquik, joss sticks, Players No. 6, beanbags, and this and that kind of grass. The University of ...”

“... West German economic miracle. The occupation is often remembered as the moment when young Germans took to jazz and, like Sollors, aped the casual manner of the American soldiers posted in their country, but it was primarily a time of hunger and misery, as the Germans burrowed into ruins, or joined crowds of ragged DPs trekking across the country. ‘We ...”

“... series of highlights (Diary and Letters of Madame d’Arblay, 1842-46), they were savaged by John Wilson Croker in the Tory Quarterly Review. Hatchet jobs were Croker’s speciality: it was his review of Endymion that Byron joked was the cause of Keats’s death in Don Juan (‘’Tis strange the mind, that very fiery particle,/Should let itself be ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... throughout the second century AD, authors such as Achilles Tatius, Dictys of Crete, and Lollianus took up Phoenicia as the subject and the setting of their fictional works. Heliodorus famously plays with the word phoinix throughout his novel, using it in every possible sense: merchants from Tyre, the dark red colour of murex dye or blood, dates and palm ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”