“... similar. After a talk suggesting the end of the world was not nigh, a Jewish Angeleno came up, took me to one side, and burst into a confession of how fearful he felt about Armageddon. Though born in the US, and with no direct link to old Vienna, he was unmoved by the high-profile alliance between US and Israeli foreign policy – was this not an ...”

“... and where by the early 1920s both the poet laureate Robert Bridges and the future poet laureate John Masefield had established themselves in suburban comfort. Graves lived from 1919 to 1921 in Dingle Cottage at the bottom of Masefield’s garden. I walk my dog past the cottage quite often. It’s set down in a marshy hollow which has a faint air of primal ...”

“... to stop jostling for advantage and to start brooding on revenge. ‘Victories and defeats,’ as John Stoessinger put it, summarising Kissinger’s thinking, ‘merely lead to other wars. Only a settlement without victory or defeat could lead to stability.’ Talk of national honour was a useful holding device, because honour could never be satisfied: it ...”

“... with becoming a plumber or hairdresser or sushi chef. It would support a view of authorship like John Gregory Dunne’s, who described writing for a living as ‘a job, like laying pipe’.Imitating Authors describes two developments over the past three centuries that helped imitation lose its old sense and take a pejorative turn. The first is the ...”

“... than just an academic dispute about scraps of paper in the archives,’ the Anglo-German historian John Röhl wrote in 2015. ‘It marked the point at which civil society in the Federal Republic admirably turned its back on a difficult past to embrace Western values and share its destiny with that of its neighbours. The transformation was profound and ...”

“... separated from the southern Catholic Netherlands, still governed by Spain, first in the person of John of Austria. By the end of the century, the ever more numerous Dutch soldiers came to be quartered in northern towns and villages, and it was their prerogative to plunder the countryside. A squad under an officer might emerge from town to waylay a rich convoy ...”

“... and ‘high jinks’ – and framed events as though they were fictional. The playwright John Guare, who called Knox ‘my kind of murderess’, wondered whether she was a heroine in the mould of ‘Daisy Miller, an innocent young girl who goes to Europe for experience? Or is she Louise Brooks, the woman who takes what she wants and destroys ...”

“... versions of the story; it was beside Wilde’s in another. In either case, he later wrote that he took the sponge, wiped his name out and made his way quickly to the railway station. Gide, who was 25, had met Wilde before in Paris and Florence. He left three accounts of their meeting in Algiers; some of what he said was later hotly denied by Douglas. The ...”

“... for TV. Patten, who seems to have accepted Dimbleby’s electronic eavesdropping even before he took up his post in Hong Kong, is of a generation and culture brought up on the power of TV’s seductive simplifications: if baulked by the Foreign Office, he tells Dimbleby, ‘I’ll do what I’ve always done; which is to take the first opportunity in front ...”

“... without warning – deep into one’s narcissistic wounds. Not long ago, apropos of nothing, she took mournful pleasure in observing that with my whimsical new blue-framed glasses, floppy dyed-blonde locks and middle-aged paunch, I was beginning to resemble David Hockney. But she has become a lot less dangerous overall. I take advantage of her inattention ...”

“... of policy and to the courts on matters of law. When a Home Secretary, Lord Halifax, was sued by John Wilkes for punitive damages for having unlawfully issued a general warrant to search for seditious papers, Chief Justice Wilmot told the jury: ‘The law makes no difference between great and petty officers. Thank God, they are all amenable to ...”

“... curator of the museum – the ‘Wonder House’. The curator is a tribute to Kipling’s father, John Lockwood Kipling, who moved to Bombay as curator of the J.J. School of Art in 1865, the year of Kipling’s birth. But through the figure of the curator, Kipling also indirectly acknowledges the existence of a colonial India of intellectual collaboration ...”

“... which he makes Quilty recite prior to his murder, the adjectives suddenly obtrude: ‘Because you took advantage of a sin / when I was helpless moulting moist and tender ... ’ And when the young Nabokov is attracted to Tamara in Speak, Memory, his tendresse resorts to the same paired adjectives, appropriately relocated: ‘the tender, moist gleam on her ...”

“... to would-be sportsmen not only of ‘professional hunters’ but of ‘white hunters’. Roosevelt took his expedition very seriously and fired 33 letters in 18 months at Frederick Selous. (Cameron spells his middle name ‘Courtney’.) That legendary hero had very little experience of East Africa, but when Roosevelt proposed a light tent of waterproof ...”