“... 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 ...”

“... 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 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... minister the candidates lined up to replace him included Jim Callaghan, Roy Jenkins, Tony Benn, Anthony Crosland, Michael Foot and Denis Healey. It was, by any historical standards, an impressive cast list. The Parliamentary Labour Party made the right choice in plumping for Callaghan over the initial favourite, Healey, and the surprise early ...”

“... Lynn had a third daughter, Alison, with Irving, and Leslie had two more children, Diana and Anthony Stone. It’s Di too who most strongly links and splits Love’s Work with the famously ‘forbidding’ The Broken Middle, in which it appears in a new guise as Di-remption, ‘modernity’s ancient predicament’, as Rose introduces it, ‘this ...”

“... the man obliged to seal the deal was the Labour MP for Grimsby, the then foreign secretary, Anthony Crosland.Barred from the rich fisheries off Iceland, Hardie turned to Norway, which, although it was outside the EEC, offered EEC fishing vessels the chance to fish there under a quota system negotiated through Brussels.* One time he arrived off Norway ...”

“... of Israel sprang. ‘The more rational, but more exhausted – the thinner-blooded – Jews of the West’ (included here are German and Danubian lands) were ‘not the stuff from which a new society could be moulded overnight. If the Jews of Russia had not existed, neither the case for, nor the possibility of realising, Zionism could have arisen in any ...”

“... or Irishness, he loved the Irish landscape. In 1932 he wrote to McGreevy about a trip to the west of Ireland with his brother Frank, describing Galway as a grand little magic grey town full of sensitive stone and bridges and water. We … spent a day walking on Achill right out over the Atlantic … Altogether it was an unforgettable trip and much too ...”