“... Palace, a Soviet-era complex overlooking Baku Bay. BP’s chairman, Helge Lund, and its former CEO Lord Browne had come, as a corporate press release put it, to ‘pay tribute’ to Heydar’s ‘exceptional contributions to the development of Azerbaijan and the entire region’. The previous day, Ilham Aliyev had seized the breakaway region of ...”

“... have to satisfy the demands of the all-powerful and long-serving head of CIA counter-intelligence, James Jesus Angleton, who has recently died. The undeniably brilliant Angleton was also at least half-crazy. He saw moles everywhere and had paralysed the CIA for years on end with his frenetic witch-hunting. (One CIA officer wrote a bitter report suggesting that ...”

“... The protection of privacy was largely left by the common law to the law of trespass. If, as Lord Camden said in the North Briton case, the eye cannot trespass, the answer was to build a wall. If you had no property you had no privacy. The law was no better advanced when in 1990 the actor Gorden Kaye, who was seriously ill in hospital when journalists ...”

“... their educational and economic outcomes. This was the second such study; the first, led by James Douglas, followed nearly 14,000 individuals born in the first week of March 1946. By 1981 Butler was running the project with Mia Kellmer Pringle, an educational psychologist born in Vienna who had arrived in Britain as a refugee in the 1930s (Pearson ...”

“... the printers) the distinction can’t be quite so clear. There’s talk in these essays of Henry James dictating to Mary Weld (she records that it took 194 days to dictate The Wings of the Dove but makes no mention of content or quality) and of Erle Stanley Gardner’s fiction factory, with his suite of Della Streets banging out the latest Perry Mason ...”

“... fashion, philanthropy and philandering in ways that could have made him a character in a Henry James novel. More consequentially, Loomis’s mother was a Stimson, of the patrician New York banking and professional family. Loomis was extremely close to his older cousin Henry Stimson, who, after establishing himself as a corporate lawyer to the East Coast ...”

“... history’ involves the same sort of hyperbole as the Earl of Northampton’s claim, in 1610, that James I was ‘free from banqueting and surfeiting’. This sort of language gives hostages to fortune, and Sharpe’s claim has already been refuted in Dr Alison Gill’s thesis on the collection of Ship Money, which supersedes the collection figures on which ...”

“... The late James Cameron always liked to claim that the only male company in which he felt at home was that of his fellow journalists. They offered him, he wrote in his autobiography, ‘the conversational shorthand of completely common understanding’. Nor was his in any way an exceptional reaction. The existence across the world of various favoured journalistic watering-holes – sometimes grandly known as Press Clubs, more usually simply hotel bars with squatters’ rights established – is one proof of that ...”

“... Patai explains, according to Talmudic cosmology, tohu, of the tohu bohu translated in the King James Bible as ‘without form and void’; an essential part of the chaos which was all there was before God separated and ordered the world into existence. These were the seas that contained Rahab, Leviathan and other sea monsters which, sings the Psalmist, God ...”

“... Soane was born in 1753, the son of a Berkshire bricklayer. At 15 he met a London architect, James Peacock, who was closely associated with George Dance, architect to the City of London. Dance gave Soane a place in his household. After three or four years he left Dance for Henry Holland, from whom he learned more of the business side of building and on ...”

“... Like most such symposia, The Socialist Agenda is a bit of a rag-bag. Some of the essayists – Lord McCarthy on incomes policy is the most painful example – have nothing new to say. Others – notably, James Meade on fixing money rates of pay, Ian Little on ‘Social Democracy and the International Economy’, Raymond ...”

“... be a second-rate motor salesman, or a yellow-press journalist, pickled in alcohol and nicotine,’ James Bond tells himself about halfway through From Russia with Love, the fifth and perhaps the best of Ian Fleming’s thrillers. This sounds like good advice, but it does raise one large issue: what exactly counts as being ‘pickled’? Flying from London to ...”

“... because he thought it would sell. It did: there were 23 editions between 1481 and 1700. Now James Simpson, a medievalist at Harvard, has translated Caxton’s History of Reynard the Fox into colloquial modern English. The book opens with the lion, the king of the beasts, calling the animals to court to celebrate the feast of Pentecost. The first thing ...”

“... these poems recall the ‘loco-descriptive’ poetry of mid-18th-century Britain, best known from James Thomson’s The Seasons. As Dr Johnson demonstrated, you can cut every other line from The Seasons without appreciable loss. The culprits in Doty, as in Thomson, are monotony of tone and monotony of structure. Doty favours meditative lyrics of a standard ...”

“... and Country Women’s Organisations, and a decorous affair with John Pentland, grandson of Lord Aberdeen: ‘I can’t give him all with abandon and urgent desire.’ A hundred and fifty pages of schoolgirlish sentiments and solemnities (‘work is the only only only remedy for life’) is more than enough, and it is a relief when emancipation comes ...”