“... has always come out on top. If you picture him now, you might be visualising Charlton Heston in Anthony Mann’s epic of 1961, filmed in Franco’s Spain. For the climactic final scene, Mann restaged the most memorable story of the Castilian warlord, who conquered the Muslim city-state of Valencia and ruled over it for five years until his death in ...”

“... shepherd boys’ and ‘honey-sweet sheep bells’ (‘Once in Arcady’), even, in ‘A Rune for Anthony John’, ‘Poecil carpets’. In ‘Sanctuary’, the narrator commands of the flowers, ‘Lie so. Be beautiful’, and they lie so even throughout Day Lewis’s next collection, Country Comets (1928), which is filled with ever more intimations of ...”

“... these basic mythemes into their own forms of ‘poetic space’ or ‘heroic memory’, as Anthony Smith terms them in his fundamental study of The Ethnic Origins of Nations. In a moving passage, Braudel confessed his passion for France, but promised to put it aside in his book. He characteristically added: ‘It is possible that it will play tricks on ...”

“... Willesden Green Station on the Metropolitan Line. This was one of several neighbourhoods in North-West London to which prospering Jews tended to migrate from East London in the 1920s and 1930s, the most notorious being Golders Green, otherwise known as Goldberg Green or the Polish Corridor. We were to live in Teignmouth Road till 1940, so it is inevitable ...”

“... megaton were tested. In August 1953 the Soviet Union exploded a large nuclear weapon, known in the West as Joe-4, which it announced was thermonuclear. US weapon scientists have known for some time, however, that the yield of Joe-4 was only about 200-300 kilotons and that it was therefore unlikely to have been a hydrogen bomb in the Ulam-Teller sense. This has ...”

“... with the essences belonging to, for example, Peter Ackroyd, Anita Brookner, William Boyd, Anthony Burgess and Peter Hall. This is typical, alas. First repetition: Kenneth has left Paris, even though his father has promised to introduce him to the ‘agent who had forced Tsvetaeva’s husband to work for the GPU’. Kenneth prefers the Midwest because ...”

“... with Nikki. But not long after Nikki was born, she and David split up. Next, she got together with Anthony Waldron, whose mother, Shirley, was a welfare rights officer. They had Zara in 1989, and Niomi in 1991. ‘But his mam wasn’t happy because I was a single parent, so I wasn’t suitable,’ Sharon said. ‘We ended up arguing, so I asked ...”

“... the discussions. ‘Does anyone imagine that Mr Gorbachev would be prepared to talk at all if the West had already disarmed?’ she asked her audience, entirely confident of the answer. But in the event something unexpected happened. Though she liked Reagan and was readily charmed by him, Thatcher had always been a little suspicious of his occasional flights ...”

“... themselves caught between two police cordons, one beside the town hall and a second several blocks west. ‘At about 7.30,’ one of them, Peter Blake, remembered, ‘a roar went through the crowd, emanating from the rear. People turned and looked westwards down the street. I saw, to my amazement, a coach being driven fast straight into the back of the ...”

“... visions (such as Skinner’s novel Walden Two, from 1948) as well as dystopian ones (such as Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, from 1962).Elements of behaviourism became enmeshed with psychoanalysis in mid-20th-century America via the work of the psychiatrist Adolf Meyer, whose theoretical approach dominated the profession there between the Second ...”

“... Ronald Colman to David Niven. I particularly enjoyed the Yorkshire TV series in the 1970s, with Anthony Valentine as a notably suave and sinister Raffles and Christopher Strauli as a frightened Bunny. The combination of mannered elegance and genuine nervous tension never fails.Ernest William Hornung, always known as Willie, was born in Middlesbrough in ...”

“... because the wife has all the power.’ So they spent the evening at a Portuguese-run restaurant in West Kensington called the Village Fayre, where the conversation never stopped for the six people at the corner table. Miguel brought the car. About 10 p.m. Ines began agitating because she had a chemistry exam in the morning. She said she would just head back to ...”

“... at one of the surviving copes from the set of vestments given to Westminster Abbey by Henry VII. Anthony Symondson has written about its subsequent history in a piece in the Catholic Herald and how, via a 17th-century second-hand dealer in London and the Catholic college at St Omer, it eventually ended up at Stonyhurst. The vestments were designed apparently ...”

“... Federation), specifically designed for secondary-school students. What now remained of its small, west Berlin cell contrived to hide its duplicating apparatus in the Halensee flat. ‘The comrades concluded that, since I was a British subject, I would be less at risk; or perhaps that the police would be less likely to raid our flat,’ Hobsbawm later ...”

“... can also be seen in the work of the historian with whom Ginzburg can perhaps best be compared, Anthony Grafton, another astonishing comet of learning. The two, each from Jewish families with a political background, one in Turin, the other Manhattan, share a common starting-point in seasons in London at the Warburg Institute, with the influence of Arnaldo ...”