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“... office. Both were by Emil Nolde. Brecher (1936) was a typically Noldean seascape, dark blue-green breakers against a glowing red sky. The other painting was less ominous: a garden picture from 1915, Blumengarten (Thersens Haus). Emil Nolde’s ‘Blumengarten (Thersens Haus)’ (1915). This and ‘Brecher’ (below) were the two paintings that hung ...”

“... also part of their appeal. Verrey’s in Regent Street was a place to see and be seen. It had dark green panels and small square tables with red-shaded candles. The ceiling had silver arches and there were so many mirrors on the walls that diners were reflected multiple times. One restaurant critic, Nathaniel Newnham-Davis, called it a ‘rendezvous of the ...”

“... its own system of beadles and watchmen charged with maintaining order and apprehending miscreants. Henry Fielding’s Bow Street Runners, the first detective force, were introduced in 1749, and individuals could employ private thief-takers (often former thieves) to catch criminals and put them before a magistrate, but it took the success – and commercial ...”

“... ladies and foreigners with long hair, and educated Englishmen did not sing’. Sir William Henry Hadow, a leading educational reformer after the First World War, remembered the schooling he had received in the 1870s by noting that music had beenthe reluctant substitute for cricket, all the more bitter because it carried the suspicion of an unmanly ...”

“... was variation in colour. Chemical compounds containing strontium burn red; copper carbonate adds green; iron filings make showers of golden sparkles.China’s appetite for novelty also led to chains of multiple ignitions and wooden dragons spitting fire. The 16th-century scholar Feng Ying Ching wrote about a kind of bomb from which sprang ground rats and ...”

“... a medium spoke in the presence of Mrs William James of a communication from a ‘Mary’ to Henry, the message was dutifully passed on to Henry James in England, who wrote that it was his ‘dear Mother’s unextinguished consciousness breaking through the interposing vastness of the universe and pouncing upon the ...”

“... on Whitman, including opera and painting, and about the influence of Whitman on others, including Henry James – who read Whitman, he told Edith Wharton, in ‘a mood of subdued ecstasy’ – and Hopkins, who wrote: ‘I always knew in my heart Walt Whitman’s mind to be more like my own than any man living.’ ‘Hopkins must have been ...”

“... emerges in these books like a heat map, flaring in patches round the edges at Shepherd’s Bush Green or Clapham Common, where activity concentrates at night around public lavatories, and further out, at Wimbledon Common (‘exactly five miles from the bright lights of Piccadilly’), where in 1963 a reporter from the News of the World, high on ...”

“... Bryan Carsberg of Oftel smiles up in soft brown light as he dangles in the mirror on a green office wall. Michael Meyer of Emess Lighting is dissected by the blinds that cut across him and then reassembled from outside – his shirtsleeved figure looming like a target in the formulaic eye of some Hollywood assassin ...”

“... siphoned off to finance ‘security’. That audit reports were commissioned at all owes a lot to Henry Waxman, a Democrat and ranking minority member of the House of Representatives Committee on Government Reform. Waxman voted in favour of the invasion of Iraq. But since the war he’s been demanding that the Bush administration account for its cost. Within ...”

“... signifier for glamour; ‘the colour of the sea’ is meaningless – it can be grey, blue, brown, green. Powell delivers an image of indelible precision and detail.Conversation typically comes next as a marker. A quarter of A la recherche is made up of dialogue; a half of A Dance to the Music of Time. Speech in Proust is generally entertaining – it is where ...”

“... a group of people, a remarkable chorus, club or consensus composed of Robert Burns, David Hume and Henry Cockburn, while the nearby estate of Auchinleck, mentioned in an additional stanza contained in one version of the poem, was called ‘romantic’ by a son of the house, James Boswell. Kyle counts, then, as a highly romantic vicinity. But it is far from ...”

“... everyone who is granted unrestricted access to secrets beyond top secret. He remembers telling Henry Kissinger in a briefing after Kissinger had become Nixon’s National Security Adviser: After you’ve started reading all this daily intelligence input and become used to using what amounts to whole libraries of hidden information, which is much more ...”

“... variety of causes, in which the common theme has been a desire to take on the evil-doers, from Henry Kissinger to Mother Teresa to Bill Clinton to Saddam Hussein. The United States is a great country for political romantics because there is always something going on. There are almost limitless occasions on which to display yourself. But what’s wrong with ...”

“... cheering, great sociability. A ball is arranged, but before it the Captain of the Alcyone, Sir Henry Somerset, and his wife ask Talbot to dinner: he is still somewhat dazed from bangs on the head and heavy doses of the ship’s panacea, a tincture of opium, but he goes and he is instantly enraptured by Miss Chumley, an orphan Lady Somerset is taking out to ...”