“... Were​ they art, or publicity? Can we settle on ‘magic’? Humphrey Bogart was born on Christmas Day, 1899. Lauren Bacall died on 12 August 2014. So the span of William Mann’s well-researched dual biography is some 115 years. But a case can be made that the ‘greatest love affair’ promised by Mann amounted to no more than 216 minutes in the busy years of the mid-1940s ...”

“... Choderlos de Laclos​ ’s Liaisons dangereuses is remembered for its salacious intrigues, but it’s also about the condition of women. Addressing the Vicomte de Valmont, her partner in games of intimate deception, the Marquise de Merteuil declares that all aspects of social life are more fraught with danger for women: ‘As for you men, your defeats are only a success the less ...”

“... English about this. It’s how democracy works. In June 1963, shortly after Profumo quit, David Ben-Gurion, the Israeli prime minister, also resigned, ground down by the consequences of the Lavon affair, Israel’s own spy scandal. This one too was serious: no sex, plenty of violence. Ben-Gurion was accused of covering up his involvement in a botched ...”

“... when it came to Gillray’s turn he made them all kneel reverentially and drink to Jacques-Louis David, a notorious republican, as the “first painter and patriot in Europe”.’ The anecdote is second-hand but entirely credible, and the question only occurs later: could he have meant it? No one was sure at the time. Draper Hill surmised that the meeting ...”

“... looked burdened, his eyes heavily pouched, his shoulders sagging, a cigarette (two cigarettes in David Levine’s caricatures) always in his hand, a man wearied by liberalism’s failures, American literature’s failures. Grinberg recounts a fine moment early in his career. In 1936, Trilling was informed by the English Department that as a Marxist, a ...”

“... two preoccupations – immigration and Europe – would finally start to converge. When it fell to David Cameron to try to get a grip on the slippery European question, he resorted to the time-honoured tactic of promising to get tough at the negotiating table. In 2011, he announced in Brussels that he would veto any new treaty for the Eurozone – at that ...”

“... Until the detention of ‘enemy combatants’ at Guantánamo Bay, few legal disputes in the United States had provoked such impassioned international criticism as the 1921 conviction and 1927 execution of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Italian immigrants found guilty of robbing and murdering a factory paymaster and a security guard in broad daylight in South Braintree, Massachusetts ...”

“... On 10 September last year, protons – tiny particles ordinarily found deep inside atoms – completed their first lap around the inside of the Large Hadron Collider, the new particle accelerator near Geneva. Revved up to enormous speeds by supercooled magnets, the protons raced around the LHC’s huge ring, 27 kilometres in circumference. They criss-crossed the French-Swiss border more than ten thousand times a second before smashing into each other, releasing primordial fireworks ...”

“... When and where does modern war begin? With tanks or gas warfare in 1914-18? With the aerial bombardment of civilians in Mesopotamia in 1920? At Guernica in 1937? With the general conscription, guerrilla campaigns and worldwide conflict of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars between France and Britain and their allies between 1793 and 1815? Or with the destruction of civilian lives and ecosystems in the Thirty Years War of 1618-48 that depopulated a good part of Central Europe? Scholars and writers tend to claim transformational status for the war they happen to be writing about, as Paul Fussell did for the Great War – which was also declared exceptional by those who thought of it as the war to end all wars ...”

“... In 1979, shortly after the signing of the peace treaty between their two countries, President Navon of Israel presented President Sadat of Egypt with a copy of The Guide for the Perplexed, composed in Egypt in the 12th century by the Jewish scholar Maimonides. Navon remarked on the book’s language – it was written in Arabic, but in Hebrew script – and stressed the kinship between Hebrew and Arabic, while Sadat spoke of the long history of co-operation between Arabs and Jews, and noted that Maimonides had drawn inspiration from Muslim philosophers ...”

“... In​ his Svendborg Poems, written in exile in Denmark in the 1930s, Brecht wrote: ‘In the dark times/Will there also be singing? Yes, there will also be singing/About the dark times.’ His life was shaped by these dark times. He came of age during the First World War, became a successful writer in the years before Hitler’s rise to power, spent 16 years as an émigré, and returned to Berlin only to clash with the East German apparatchiks ...”

“... The 18th century​ was a great age for criminals. Western European countries were awash with more private wealth than ever before, but their police forces remained weak, at least by modern standards. Communications were slow and unreliable, and only the most rudimentary means existed for tracking individual malefactors. Especially in remote towns, a determined band might carry out a brazen robbery, and it would be days before the constabulary responded, by which point the perpetrators had long since disappeared ...”

“... Angry men​ and furious machines.’ No verb, no explanation – it is the first line of ‘Dutch Graves in Bucks County’, a poem that Wallace Stevens published in 1943. The image may have come from a march-of-time documentary of Americans training to fight in the Second World War. Probably the machines included tanks and a lorry convoy, possibly a squadron of fighter planes ...”

“... Back in​ 2004, when he was riding high, before the collapse of the venerable retailer BHS in 2015 and his recent naming in the House of Lords by the Labour peer Peter Hain as a ‘powerful businessman using non-disclosure agreements and substantial payments to conceal the truth about serious and repeated sexual harassment, racist abuse and bullying’, Philip Green gave a self-congratulatory interview to the Guardian ...”

“... One of​ the better arguments for Britain’s leaving the EU was that it might reinvigorate and liberate national politics, stifled for too long by the absence of real choice at election time. The EU is a legalistic and treaty-based political institution designed to take some of the heat out of domestic politics. That left people complaining that the EU was generating all the heat ...”