“... finding the experience particularly off-putting. That wasn’t true of some of their peers. David Bomberg, a far greater artist (his Ronda Bridge from 1935, reproduced here, leaps out from the page), would later exhibit with the AIA, but he was deeply unnerved by his own visit to the Soviet Union in the early 1930s and kept his distance from the ...”

“... grungers Green River adopted the nickname of a femicidal mass murderer.In 1988, Melody Maker’s David Stubbs declared that it had been ‘the best ever year for rock music’, listing 49 bands in evidence. Hardly any of them had cracked the top ten of the album chart. Three years later, the unthinkable happened: grunge went mainstream, with Nirvana’s ...”

“... F ew terms​ in international politics appear so infirm, so doddering, yet so indomitable as ‘the West’. Attempts to replace it – ‘the developed world’, ‘the free world’, ‘the liberal international order’, ‘the global North’ – have only underscored its endurance. When Oswald Spengler leaped out of obscurity with the publication of the first volume of The Decline of the West in the last months of the First World War, he inaugurated a genre of premature autopsies: The End of the West; The Defeat of the West; The Abandonment of the West; The Death of the West; Suicide of the West ...”

“... and she went in search of him. At a pub near Avondale Square she met a friend of Ronnie’s called David. He said he’d been with Ronnie the day before and that Ronnie was in bed the last time he saw him. (The coroner would later describe this man as an ‘unsavoury witness’ without detailing why.) Mrs Pinn, in company with another boy from the bar, went to ...”

“... the same from one abbey to the next.2 April, Yorkshire. Come across a thirty-year-old note from David Vaisey, at that time a postgraduate student at Bodley and subsequently its Librarian. The note just has a crudely drawn swastika and the slogan ‘A.L. Raus’.14 April. Pass two slightly cheeky-looking middle-aged businessmen in Hanover Square, one of whom ...”

“... to do.’ Dimbleby adds, by way of rumour, that Major and Hurd regarded the outgoing governor, Sir David Wilson (who was sacked to make way for Patten), ‘as one of the principal advocates of the “appeasement” of China, an approach which they believed could no longer be sustained after the atrocity of Tiananmen Square in June 1989’. But, while he avoids ...”

“... baggy-trousered, plays the proprietor with a weasel brilliance I have not seen since the heyday of F.J. McCormick.’ MacGowran was a lead Irish actor who could hold the stage in the central plays in the Irish repertory. But these plays were few – notably the plays of Synge and Shaw and O’Casey, and perhaps O’Neill if you agreed that he was Irish ...”

“... government and security officials overseas and in the UK – among them, Assistant Commissioner David Veness, head of Specialist Operations for the Metropolitan Police, the officer in overall operational charge of countering terror in the United Kingdom. Dr Ranstorp is an expert on Hizbollah, and books such as Palestinian Hamas, Defiant Patriot, The Kidnap ...”

“... envisaged both by Article 53 of the convention and by Section 11 of the Human Rights Act itself. David Cameron advocates replacement of the Human Rights Act with a bill of rights and responsibilities entrenched against repeal. Gordon Brown advocates a new constitutional document ‘in parallel’, as the recent green paper puts it, with a bill of rights and ...”

“... to touch the ground, as one meeting followed another in Berlin, Paris, Moscow, Washington, Camp David and Ottawa. As Sarotte says, the tempo was at times ‘unimaginable’. At the Ottawa conference in February 1990, which was supposed to be about aviation, Baker ‘managed in just one day … to speak at least five times each to both Genscher and ...”

“... most of it), which should be seen as cautionary rather than exemplary. Andrew is critical of Sir David Petrie, ‘one of the service’s most successful DGs’ (at the time of the Double-Cross System during the war), for claiming that ‘too much of a past that is now remote can help but little with useful lessons,’ but Petrie may have been right in this ...”

“... In January 1999, Colin Middleton hanged himself in prison. He’d been in custody since 1982, when he was convicted – aged 14 – of murdering his 18-month-old niece. While in prison, he had harmed himself seriously, written to the governor about his mental illness, and spoken about suicide to other inmates. On the day before his death he didn’t leave his cell, even for meals, and placed a rug over the inspection port ...”

“... bogeyman years, regularly invoked by politicians of all parties as the nadir of postwar Britain. David Cameron (though it could just as easily have been Gordon Brown) read out the charge sheet at a Demos meeting in 2006: ‘economic decline . . . inflation, stagnation and rising unemployment . . . deteriorating industrial relations’. Nearly 30 million ...”

“... Beyond the Fringe. A process was set in motion which was to culminate in Jonathan Ross asking David Cameron whether he masturbated when he thought of Mrs Thatcher, and Little Ant and Little Dec asking Blair: ‘If you make an ugly smell, do people pretend not to notice because you is the prime minister?’ The coming series of election debates on TV ...”

“... Like many Francophiles, I’ve never read a book about Paris. Not a whole one, all the way through, anyway. Of course, I’ve bought enough of them, of every sort, and in some cases the hope of their being read has extended over several years. For instance, I was almost sure I would tackle the distinguished art critic John Russell’s Paris (1960), ‘with photographs by Brassaï’, but never got past the pictures ...”