“... Cassatt (who she hoped would be her partner in a ‘chaste and intellectual marriage’). The next day, wearing a hired prince costume embroidered with pearls, and carrying roses and cornflowers, Barney called on de Pougy. (She usually rejected more mannish clothes – ‘why try to resemble our enemies’ – but they could be useful when trying to seduce ...”

“... awoken one morning etc, we might not have had The Corsair (which sold ten thousand copies on the day of publication), The Bride of Abydos, Lara, and the rest of the Eastern tales that followed. The lionisation, the affair with Lady Caroline Lamb that succeeded it, and the affair with his half-sister which succeeded that, the marriage, the separation, the ...”

“... This roughly describes the ideal content of the popular family newspaper from 1918 to the present day. In 1963, the Profumo scandal offered scope for reporting all or most of the prohibited subjects (allowing for the odd change in terminology), including, if I remember rightly, something about animals – dogs, I think, not rabbits. Yet very few of the grubby ...”

“... would lie in bringing about the unification of all Ireland.’ The foreign secretary, Alec Douglas-Home, also believed that ‘the real British interest would … be served best by pushing them [the Unionists] towards a United Ireland.’ How revealing the apposition between ‘British’ and ‘them’. The signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 ...”

“... In Ridley Scott’s Black Rain (1989), two New York City cops, maverick Nick Conklin (Michael Douglas) and happy-go-lucky (i.e. obviously doomed) Charlie Vincent (Andy Garcia) escort a Japanese gangster by the name of Sato (Yusaku Matsuda) back to Osaka to face charges. They manage to lose him at Osaka airport, and thereafter have a hard time imposing ...”

“... in the miners’ confrontation with Ted Heath’s government. When Armstrong’s colleague Sir Douglas Allen, the permanent secretary at the Treasury, speculated openly about coming in to work and finding tanks drawn up on Horse Guards Parade, his colleagues couldn’t tell whether or not he was joking. Was the UK on the brink of a left-wing revolution or ...”

“... as the passing of a more graceful age. Lee’s biographers used to fall into the second camp. Douglas Southall Freeman’s four-volume biography, published in 1934 and 1935, was the standard text for many decades. Freeman drove past Lee’s statue in Richmond every day on his way to work and saluted it. But more recent ...”

“... herself was being worn down by the relentless pressure. So he got his way, with a little help from Douglas Hurd, and it is arguably the sole significant achievement of his political career up until the moment he became PM. It is also arguably the most significant factor in condemning this country to the most sustained and damaging recession since the ...”

“... on which the court intervened was that the grant was not authorised by the statute under which Douglas Hurd, the foreign secretary, had purportedly made it, because it was not capable of fulfilling the statutory purpose of promoting development. In other words, the court was doing its job of testing the legality of executive action against the relevant ...”

“... Co-ordinating Committee, where she registered black voters in Georgia. During college she met Douglas Collins, ‘white, a compulsive philanderer, and a charismatic poet/painter/commodities trader/onetime inmate’, in their daughter’s words. After they divorced, Collins raised her two children in upstate New York while teaching film history and ...”

“... when the Presidents of Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia met in an emergency summit to discuss Sir Alec Douglas Home’s announcement in July 1970 that Britain would sell arms to South Africa. Mr Smith was invited to join the Presidents’ meeting and he brings out well the unbridgeable chasm of mistrust which opened between Britain and Obote and Nyerere. Unlike ...”

“... with two bullets in it is discovered at a flat in Shepherd Market, and Detective Superintendent Douglas Archer of Scotland Yard is called to investigate. ‘As long as the Germans let him get on with the job of catching murderers,’ Archer thinks, ‘he’d do his work as he’d always done it.’ It isn’t that simple, of course: in part because the ...”

“... of Bolivia, General Rene Barrientos, apparently first consulted with the American Ambassador Douglas Henderson, then ordered Che to be summarily shot. (Jean Cormier’s new biography follows the Cuban line that this was a decision made in Washington.) Che’s diary of the Bolivian campaign was subsequently extracted from his captors, and published in ...”

“... is dead: he writes that Hogg defended Munich ‘to the end of his days’ and ‘to his dying day’.) But his reasons have changed over time and were never entirely coherent. The fact that his father was in the Cabinet that made the deal, and appears, indeed, to have been the first to apply the phrase ‘peace with honour’ to the occasion, may have ...”

“... so badly over this and for his flat opposition to British membership of the EEC, rather as latter-day Gaitskellites are inclined to perform elaborate contortions to prove that his famous ‘No, no and no again’ speech about Europe somehow meant yes. Thorpe treats us to all manner of sophistical argument to justify lying in politics but never faces up to the ...”