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“... Pushkin, according to one critic, ‘could think and speak as a pagan, a Christian, a medieval knight, a Renaissance man, a votary of Voltaire and a disciple of Rousseau’. It is surely as his disciple that Thomas in these two books seeks to embrace in the same unifying vision both the characteristic horrors and the fresh starts of the 20th century: in ...”

“... denunciations of English chauvinism and of British Imperial policy in Egypt, Ireland and India. These were presumably ignored at the time by the English, just as they have ignored Portugal’s greatest novelist ever since. Eça’s great awakening came as a result of the opening of the railway line from Paris. He and his fellow students at the ...”

“... workers too many rights. It was the EU’s fault that British companies didn’t export more to India. European immigrants were to blame for the shortage of social housing. It wasn’t his natural audience. Clever teenagers, teachers, the entourages of rival politicians. Only soft drinks were on offer. He failed to sparkle. The vote at the end was won by ...”

“... respectability. The South Sea Company might have collapsed, but the Turkey Company, the East India Company and the Royal Africa Company were going strong. Nabobs from India and plantation-owners from the West Indies, along with admirals loaded down with prize money, poured their wealth into London, to the mounting ...”

“... the devoted service of British-born Romans, at Hadrian’s Wall, and Indian-born Britons on India’s north-west frontier. Arthur does not come into the stories, but that is only because Parnesius’ Britain has not (yet) been abandoned, though the signs of decay are there. Conan Doyle pushed that idea further in his grumpy story ‘The Last of the ...”

“... he be seated, standing or on horseback? Should he be dressed as a prince of peace, a Christian knight, or a field-marshal? The sculptured podium frieze, commemorating the eternal geniuses of poetry, music, art, painting and sculpture, also caused difficulties. Scott did not wish to be included, but Victoria insisted – so in he went. Four sculptured ...”

“... of the snows’), nor the Nepali Sagarmatha, preferred by Sir George Everest, Surveyor-General of India 1830-43, has caught on. At least we have been spared the name of Sir George’s successor, Andrew Waugh, who calculated that Everest, at 29,028 feet and still putting on an inch or so a year, is by a good margin the world’s highest mountain. On that rainy ...”

“... of the war in her native Lebanon; Mattias Habich as Yudishthira is a flaxen-haired Dürer knight searching for the true path; Maurice Benichou, who is French but of a North African Jewish family, has Mediterranean ease and a childlike gravity as Krishna; Alain Maratrat as Vyasa the poet has the Ancient Mariner authority of a Breton or Welsh bard; the ...”

“... Burton emerges from McLynn’s account as a chronic truant and malingerer. He drew pay as an East India Company army officer for 12 years, after 1849, during which time he never visited the sub-continent and acquired celebrity for ‘explorations’ conducted during a series of sick leaves and furloughs. Taken into the Consular Service, he deserted his posts ...”

“... the leadership of the police in the fight against delinquency and disorder. The prolific Stephen Knight has calculated that Sherlock Holmes had at least 13 predecessors, some of them women. Most were quickly forgotten, and there was every reason to suppose that Holmes would soon disappear too. He’s a derivative of the detective heroes of Edgar Allan Poe ...”

“... study in universities while we were learning to dance’. The friend checkmated Pushkin with his knight and remarked: ‘Cholera morbus is at our borders, and in five years, it’ll be here.’ Like most of his peers Pushkin knew almost nothing about the disease, which was endemic in Asia but unfamiliar to Europeans. Four years later, in 1830, he went to his ...”

“... about sex over cocoa and boiled eggs; Mrs Colenbrander tells us that when Harold and Laura Knight arrived: ‘Their brilliant painting stunned the whole colony.’ After Damit and Horse, there was Tottie Harwood and literary London. Edith Jesse didn’t want her daughter back at home after college, so she started to write to keep herself: paragraphs ...”

“... and tensions. An essential aspect of the ‘organisation of victory’ – the subtitle of Roger Knight’s excellent study – was the formation of a cadre of professional British diplomats, well endowed with the necessary skills and tenacity at a time when every journey to a foreign capital was an arduous adventure, even without the predations of French ...”

“... a dedicated traveller, mainly to continents beyond Europe. He went to Egypt in 1906, to Ceylon and India in 1910, and then made a round the world voyage in 1920-21 with stops in India, Australia, New Zealand, China, Japan, the US and Tahiti. In Polynesia he went in search of the originals for his literary god Pierre Loti’s ...”

“... American. William Casey, the CIA’s director from January 1981 to January 1987, was a Catholic Knight of Malta educated by Jesuits. Statues of the Virgin Mary filled his mansion, called ‘Maryknoll’, on Long Island. He attended mass daily and urged Christianity on anyone who asked his advice. Once settled as CIA director under Reagan, he began to funnel ...”