“... Centre at Caversham is a treasure trove, but it’s also a labyrinth in which one expects to find white-haired historians still groping myopically along the endless shelves of files, doomed to uncover material so fascinating that all likelihood of ever finishing any work of scholarship has long since passed.If ever there was a historian to whom the phrase ...”

“... Olivier as a Roman patrician in the bathtub suggesting the joys of sex and power to the slave Tony Curtis; a cowboy riding a hydrogen bomb as if in a rodeo, an American strategy expert whose artificial arm keeps offering a Hitlerian salute; a large bone twirling into the sky in slow motion, the use of ‘The Blue Danube’ to accompany the circling ...”

“... new historians, among them Segev and Naomi Shepherd, the Zionist project is part of the saga of white settlement, as in North America and Rhodesia. The settlers declared independence only when they no longer required the Mother Country’s soldiers to subdue the natives. Presenting Israelis as colonisers, rather than as enemies of imperialism, was once the ...”

“... voices of the victims, that is what it feels like too. Aids starts in the 1970s. Here’s Edmund White, describing the San Francisco gay ‘look’ in his travel book States of Desire (1980). Bodies made themselves intelligible: A strongly marked mouth and swimming, soulful eyes (the effect of the moustache); a V-shaped torso by metonymy from the open V of ...”

“... tarmac of derelict streets. The sandpiper isn’t a creature of asphalt and paving. It’s a small white-breasted bird usually to be found foraging on British foreshores in groups of twenty or so, scuttling up and down sandy beaches as the foaming forward edge of the sea roars in and hisses back. I’d come to Grimsby to see why, after seventy years of voting ...”

“... grant schools as, for instance, Leeds Grammar School did. Another absentee from the programme is Tony Harrison, an old boy of Leeds Grammar School, the snobbery of which is pilloried in some of his poems. By rights all such schools should be free schools, as indeed in the light of their origins, should many public schools. The nearest public school to us in ...”

“... them, are facts of life, that to Clinton the mere act of reprocessing was unacceptable. As the White House contemplated a call-up of reservists and the evacuation of Americans from South Korea, there was panic buying in Seoul, where the stock market fell by 25 per cent. The situation was defused by a brilliant and near-treasonous intervention by Jimmy ...”

“... back to see the original. Portions of it, particularly the bits of opus sectile in black and white, I’d like to grub up and frame, but some of it seems crude and the colours vulgar and I’ve no means of knowing whether the parts I like are the original stones and the vulgar bits Victorian renovation or the other way round. Certainly the much later ...”

“... take place. Following the brazenly nationalistic and protectionist Trump programme, the Biden White House cleaved to its own economic version of ‘America First’, deploying a new fiscal activism to nurture domestic manufacturing and revive those regions most afflicted by postindustrial decline over the last half-century, many of which – not ...”

“... but uninspired. Her civil servants liked her but thought her more a manager than a leader. Tony Crosland, her chief at education during the first Wilson government, was frustrated by her tendency to get mired in detail. Contrast this with the record of Barbara Castle, Labour’s top woman at a string of second-rank ministries a few years earlier. Like ...”

“... as a faintly preposterous dandy: ‘His silver grey suits, pink shirts, with his powdered pink and white face, his nerves, his manners, his love of praise’. ‘You make a distressingly lifelike loose woman,’ Runciman gasped after seeing him in a college sketch show. Runciman, who had won a scholarship to read history at Trinity, fitted naturally into this ...”

“... Susan’s youngest daughter Bella had worked as a housekeeper for the local schoolmaster, Bossy White, but after her marriage in 1924 her labour was confined to the home. Her wedding exemplified the patterns of gender segregation common in many mining communities; after the celebratory meal, all the men – Bella’s new husband included – left for the ...”

“... then home secretary. In 1988 Mrs Thatcher banned his voice from being broadcast but a decade later Tony Blair negotiated with him as a key participant in the peace process. Today he has easy access to the top British leadership. But Adams has not been entirely rehabilitated. In 2013 the police questioned him about his failure to disclose his brother’s sex ...”

“... shy and misunderstood. The following year he received a presidential pardon due in part, the White House said, to lobbying by the powerful and unlikely duo of Henry Kissinger and Elton John. Nonetheless Amiel remains furious at the way she and Black have been treated and is intent on establishing his innocence on all counts. Her memoir is a bookend to ...”

“... to enhance ‘Nato’s credibility’.At the height of the Kosovo war, Freedman made some edits on Tony Blair’s Chicago speech on the ‘Doctrine of the International Community’. His memo, which was disclosed by the Chilcot Inquiry, shows the difference between Freedman’s published work and his private counsel. The rhetoric – ‘our fighting men and ...”