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“... tell you not only that he meets the top people, but that he parades his ego before them: In the winter of 1998 I interviewed the Prime Minister of Thailand, Chuan Leekpai. Half joking, half serious, I began the interview by looking across the table at him and saying: ‘Mr Prime Minister, I have a confession to make. I helped oust your predecessor and I ...”

“... longevity. She was surely the only person to have inspected the defences around Madrid in the winter of 1937 and, nearly sixty years later, heard Mandela address a multiracial Parliament in Cape Town. It wasn’t that Martha clung to life; it clung to her, piling on the years like a Berber potter loading his donkey. For that alone, she’s been thought of ...”

“... the key junction town of Tokmak. Russia’s own offensive efforts in the east of the country this winter have left acres of snowfields strewn with burning vehicles and dead soldiers, with little to show in terms of ground gained. Surely, if the two sides’ war machines are jammed solid, like a pair of buzz-saw blades stuck against each other, it would be ...”

“... was the two miners’ strikes of 1972 and 1974, but the more significant episode occurred in the winter of 1970-71 when the power workers’ go-slow instantly hit electricity supplies and drove the Government to send for Lord Wilberforce to make peace for them. Interviewed by the BBC, Frank Chapple was asked whether he wasn’t ashamed of the misery his ...”

“... seen for three years, was good nature itself. It was another decade before I saw him again. In the winter of 1979, in a freezing church in Oxford, he rose like some wrathful divine to warn the congregation once more of the dangers of Gallican dogma. By now, his onslaught on Althusser in The Poverty of Theory, published the previous year, had roused much ...”

“... nationale, with an educational system that is so benevolent as to wish to send every child to winter sports, with a population that is so neurotic as to advertise le gym, c’est aussi bon pour le morale, there is no need to justify an interest in sport. With La Roue Libre organising cyclists, with I’Amicale des Trois Vallées de I’Eure or the MPM ...”

“... hot and cold. In one of the first poems, we observe him shivering in exile through a Manhattan winter, ‘flu in my bones like a lantern’, sustained only by the thought that back home all is going on as always: the seas warm and the neighbours in the open together, ‘talking over palings’. But his opening Caribbean poem begins, disorientingly, with ...”

“... as patient as a statue till he could be unveiled.’ Both indoors and outdoors, in summer as in winter, scarves, shawls and rugs were provided for maximum protection. For some Wedgwood-Darwins ‘a hot water bottle was as necessary as an arm or a leg.’ The prize for the most appealingly absurd failure among the obscure Wedgwoods must go to the ...”

“... formed KLA attacked the Serb police and, on occasion, Albanians who supported the regime. Last winter, the police withdrew from some parts of the Drenica region after armed clashes, allowing uniformed and armed Albanians to set up checkpoints. Once the US envoy Robert Gelbard had issued a statement that me KLA could be ...”

“... Ada Kennard, a dancer in a three-women act that toured the music halls. His father was a Bob: Robert Moffat Livingstone, at different times a seafarer, a window cleaner and a stagehand. According to their son, the couple hadn’t wanted children. Then one night in September 1944, Bob ran out of condoms. The memoirist writes of his conception, ‘With ...”

“... In the USSR, things had been very different: when Eisenstein restaged the storming of the Winter Palace for October, he had been allowed to close off parts of the city for hours at a time, and to deploy 8000 volunteers, many of them workers and soldiers who had taken part in the real thing; for Potemkin, he was given the use of the Black Sea Fleet for ...”

“... I fear only France.’ He believed he had secured an agreement with the prime minister, Robert Peel, and Lord Aberdeen, his foreign secretary; they thought there had been merely a friendly discussion. All this was the background to the Crimean War of 1853-55, the subject of Orlando Figes’s admirable book. The war was at once the most dramatic ...”

“... later reflected, that he had had an experienced mentor to call on for advice – someone such as Robert Louis Stevenson, who ‘had always seemed to me “one of the family”’. Greene was distantly related to RLS through his mother’s cousin. ‘Names which appeared in his Collected Letters were photographs in our family album. In the nursery we played ...”

“... assets, Paulinus and Therasia – or their friends Melania and Pinianus, who visited Nola in the winter of 406 – had embraced poverty: they retained control over substantial resources. Shielded from the demands of family, local communities and the imperial tax system, they could use their newly unencumbered wealth to support Christian ...”

“... and country in the 1590s, had sought to resolve it. The first was James I’s leading adviser Robert Cecil, first Earl of Salisbury, Lord Burghley’s son, whose ‘Great Contract’ of 1610 attempted to place the Crown’s finances on a less vexatious footing. Bedford used parliamentary pressure to the same end in 1641. Adamson’s account bears out ...”