“... James Angleton​ , chief of counterintelligence at the CIA for twenty years, was not the ideal spy. The ideal spy is a mouse-coloured blur in the crowd, someone like George Smiley, described by his wife as ‘breathtakingly ordinary’. There was nothing ordinary about Angleton. Once experienced, his history, his appearance, his manner, and his stubborn refusal to be clear were all indelible ...”

“... these texts are read only as period pieces anyway, it might appear shockingly polemical for James Shapiro to locate everything William Shakespeare wrote in 1599 in a topical context. Salzman’s aim was simply ‘to solve some of the problems raised by the theoretically informed return to history in Renaissance/early modern studies over the last fifteen ...”

“... Of the seven volumes of diaries published over the years by James Lees-Milne two have now been reissued as rather grand paperbacks, along with an eighth, a final hardback selection made by Michael Bloch. They all have titles like Ancestral Voices, Caves of Ice, Through Wood and Dale, Midway on the Waves and Prophesying Peace, and it will not escape the notice of the literate public that they are all derived, one with a bit of a spin on it, from ‘Kubla Khan ...”

“... it may be in the interest of the most venerable institutions of the state that they should do so. King Henry V is all the better for having been Prince Hal, but no woman could propose to imitate the sun (or the moon?) and allow the base contagious clouds to smother up her virtue and beauty from the world in order that her charms should shine out all the more ...”

“... out of the reach of the most powerful earthly man; it forced a degree of humility on any believing king or emperor. On the other, it meant that a ruler could believe himself humble only before God, and subject to no one else, to no earthly law or institution. The Russians of Ivan’s time were well aware of this duality. Many of the tsar’s victims went to ...”

“... out of English whimsy so much as for Hoffmann’s sinister tale of the Nutcracker and the Mouse King’. Byatt burns both ends of her thematic candle at once, for clearer illumination. At the novel’s end, the First World War comes, and cruelly reveals the political irresponsibility that has sustained the long childish innocence of upper-class English ...”

“... two were fated to be mated. As the courtier, roving fixer and tireless mouthpiece for the Burger King of Palm Beach, Giuliani would relinquish all shame, honour, dignity, self-respect and semblance of continence. According to Maggie Haberman’s Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America, he stank up the bathroom on one of ...”

“... the death of Louis? Couldn’t he have intervened to arrest the chain of events that had led the king inexorably to the guillotine? In the summer of 1792, with the Austrian and Prussian armies massing on the borders of France, threatening to invade in order to restore Louis to all the ‘legitimate authority’ he had exercised before the Revolution, the ...”

“... places from the projection of Western desires and fantasy: the image of Shangri-la, derived from James Hilton’s 1933 novel, Lost Horizon, stands for a way of seeing in which Tibet and its people play little part. To look at a city’s details without feeling their associations, Barnett argues, is to misread it. To know a city as its inhabitants do, to read ...”

“... In novels by William Dean Howells, Theodore Dreiser, Frank Norris, Kathleen Thompson, Henry James, Edith Wharton and others, the encounter with technology is a small step taken, often regardless, on a journey defined by an ever-shifting horizon of expectations and disappointments. Only in retrospect do we understand that it has unobtrusively shaped a ...”

“... formidable ally with ample weapons stocks, which nursed a long-standing animosity, reciprocated by King Hassan II and his government, towards the largely pro-Western monarchy on its western border. East Timor and Western Sahara are post-colonial narratives in the proper sense; and how badly they read. General Franco’s death followed within a year and a half ...”

“... promise of an early and highly coded, not to say obscure and ‘poetic’ novel, Nocturnes for the King of Naples, for the sordid aftermath, my tiresome and overt obsession with homosexuality. Most French critics, I’m happy to say, and in the end the publisher as well, were satisfied that I’d not turned Genet into a gay folk hero, as they’d feared – an ...”

“... their British dimension, but has ranged far beyond them. One hero of The Ancient Constitution was James Harrington, whose Oceana (1656) offered his countrymen a new, republican language of politics. Subsequently Harrington has become a hero of a much larger story. Republicanism is the theme of the second of Pocock’s two main books, The Machiavellian Moment ...”

“... The potato, which was to end it for all but fussy eaters, still awaited general adoption. But James Lind, in his definitive work on the causation of the disease, a work to which the author refers, points out the error of what she is here doing, a common medical sin of his day – that of attributing to it almost every type of lesion. Highlanders had a ...”

“... I look up at a gable-end: Lest We Forget This plaque is dedicated to the memory of Lt Col Trevor King died July 1994 Major W. (Frenchie) Marchant These men were killed near this spot by the enemies of Ulster. No Sacrifice is too great for one’s country. This looks like an unyielding Loyalist memorial, but the sense now is of working-class Protestants ...”