“... started out in London more than fifty years ago his subjects were mainly party people. In 1966, he took a picture with his Leica of someone he’d never heard of: Oskar Schindler. ‘It is not an exciting shot,’ he once said. ‘But it exists. It is just about the only photograph I have seen of Schindler.’ David Bailey, or Antonioni’s Blow-Up, was one ...”

“... never ceased to love her from that moment.’ The person who said that was known as Christopher St John, though her real name was Christabel Marshall. We know how she felt about the object of her passion, Vita Sackville-West, because she kept a ‘love-journal’ in Vita’s honour. Miss Sackville-West, who had recently (and most unusually) been abandoned by ...”

“... have fallen. The majority of the fall happened in the first years of this century, as computers took more and more of a role in the markets. We would reasonably expect that to lead to a fall in costs, and therefore a fall in spreads – that’s the whole point of using computers, from the customer’s point of view. The HFT players want to take the ...”

“... most of it – layers of thermal clothing, a good map, a pocketful of energy bars in case the walk took longer than expected – but, really, this wasn’t one of those serious, adventure trail, orienteering-type walks. It was just a last wander to say a mental goodbye before driving my hire car back to Lakselv and taking the shuttle plane down to Tromsø to ...”

“... than a philosopher, and, for all the suggestive ways in which he anticipates modes of thought that took off only long after his death, not to be filed away merely as a sort of erratic precursor. Some of the definitions he finds for the exotic in the ‘Essay’ are so inflated as quite to swamp the normal extension of that term: at one moment he has it that ...”

“... Democratic Progressive Party, a new director of the Palace Museum is chosen. Lin Jeng-yi took up the position early last year when Tsai Ing-wen was elected as Taiwan’s first female president. It is Lin’s job to explain to the Democratic Progressive Party, and to the Taiwanese, why they should be responsible for a vast collection of Chinese ...”

“... John Lennon gave his famous interview to Jann Wenner of Rolling Stone magazine at the end of 1970, a few days before the release of the most important solo-Beatle record, John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band. Rolling Stone published the interview early the following year, with the album already in the shops ...”

“... In 1735​ , the Duke of Richmond was in search of a sloth bear. He took delivery of an animal but wasn’t happy with what had arrived. ‘I wish indeed it had been the Sloath that had been sent me, for that is the most curious animal I know, butt this is nothing butt a common black bear, which I do not know what to do with, for I have five of them already,’ he wrote to Hans Sloane, who had acted as his buying agent ...”

“... the word was with God; at the end, a passage in Revelation describes an angel appearing to St John holding an open book and instructing him to eat it: ‘it will make your stomach bitter, but it will be as sweet as honey in your mouth.’ In the 12th-century Glossa Ordinaria, the standard set of medieval biblical commentaries, some passages of the Bible ...”

“... Among the illustrations in this book is a painting by John Closterman of the Marlborough family which hangs today in Blenheim Palace. On its right-hand side, as convention dictates, sits the head of the family, John Churchill, at the time of the painting, first Earl of Marlborough ...”

“... of mixing them together, as in a mouthful of beef and plum pudding. In England, the aristocracy took up the new fashion, and imported French cooks along with French tailors, French dancing masters, French musicians and French language tutors. Before too long these trends provoked a ferocious patriotic reaction. Novelists, dramatists and journalists all ...”

“... the Home Secretary. Shortly before he was due to be flown out of the UK en route for New York he took an overdose and died. With this may be compared the case of Mark Hosenball, the American journalist whom the Home Office decided should be deported as a security risk. Hosenball challenged the decision on the ground that there had been a breach of the rules ...”

“... units, under the direction of the station manager, a 35-year-old engineer named Victor Brukhanov, took up much of the Seventies. Delays, due mainly to delivery failures, meant that the first unit went on line late in September 1977, the second over a year later – a few months before the accident at Three Mile Island, itself a cause for celebration in Soviet ...”

“... One might as well say that Laurel and Hardy were provincial comics. The growth of Andy Dalziel took place in metaphors of which Wodehouse would have been proud. At first only an ex-rugby player run to slabby fat, Dalziel began to burgeon in Ruling Passion (1973), after an antique dealer called Etherege, a diabetic arrested by Dalziel while injecting ...”

“... He christened the first ‘Kilseen’, a tease on her acting abilities, but she and their friends took pleasure in the nickname and she certainly loved him. Constance was what David Cecil calls ‘a full-blooded woman’ who soon started an affair with her principal man and allowed Max to slip gracefully away. The lady he eventually married, Florence ...”