“... acted as a zealous servant of the Germans: he connived, for instance, in the transportation of young French men and women to forced labour beyond the Rhine. On the other hand, his homosexuality is judged less severely nowadays than was the case forty years ago. A comic note is struck by Bonnard’s typically French obsession with the proper conduct of ...”

“... As a young soldier in Germany at the end of the war I was dropped head first into two manifestations of the Third Reich which half a century later continue to exert a peculiar fascination. After two months in what became the Russian occupied zone, the field company to which I belonged was moved back to the Harz Mountains area ...”

“... perhaps the most popular semi-autonomous institution in the state: the ‘people’s team’, as Robert Edelman calls it in this revealing and often funny microhistory. Thanks partly to the Starostins’ imprisonment, Spartak gained an aura of independence that still persists. For many, supporting the club was a small way of saying ‘no’ to the ...”

“... Waltz), the head of Spectre and by coincidence both the son and the murderer of a man who took the young Bond under his wing. Oberhauser is operating a contraption that threatens to deprive Bond of his facial recognition abilities by driving a pair of pins into the sides of his skull – a painful operation in its initial stages, as indicated by Craig’s ...”

“... had introduced Cannadine and Cannadine had given us an encouragingly comical puff for his book, Robert Rhodes James reminded us that Lloyd George, despite doing so much to reduce the Upper House to impotence and discredit, had ended his days as Earl Lloyd George of Dwyfor, and then led us off down miles of corridors to a cellar under St Stephen’s Hall ...”

“... the celebrated ‘Lessons of the War’, both at once. I first met him in 1965, in the office of Robert Heilman, then the benevolent but firm head of the English Department at the University of Washington in Seattle. Calling to present my credentials, I walked into a row; Heilman benevolently firm, Reed furious, licensed to be furious. He was in Seattle as a ...”

“... that, I left abruptly, an unsuccessful mission. Actually, I had some slight conversation. One young man, not even born when the meeting of 1958 had taken place, asked what answer I had to Mrs Thatcher’s remark that if Hitler had had an atomic bomb he would have used it. What had CND to say to that? To judge from Hitler’s usual behaviour, Hitler would ...”

“... almost painfully joyful about the efforts of these often desperately poor and short-lived young men to make new art in a philistine country, an art that wasn’t epigonal or merely watered-down Impressionism – as one of the rooms in the exhibition puts it, towards a ‘European avant-garde’ (in a European arrière-pays, I suppose). Marc and Macke ...”

“... she expressed in different ways her dream: ‘My idea of heaven is a world without Claire.’ But Robert Gittings and Jo Manton have set the record straight here as well. Mary may often have been irritated by Claire. Few who knew her were not. But Mary was devoted to her half-sister, and in Claire’s long periods of absence yearned for news of her. ‘When I ...”

“... In May 1804, at the age of 18, Benjamin Robert Haydon left his home in Plymouth and set off for London to become a great artist. His mother was distraught, his father furious, but there was no doubt in Haydon’s mind either of his vocation or of his genius. He could have worked in his father’s bookshop and inherited a secure, independent income but he didn’t want to ...”

“... the money to get in with the disorganised semi-aristocratic opposition to the Whigs, like a Bright Young Thing bribing his way into the Chelsea Arts Club to get his picture in the Tatler. It was a very un-Byronic ambition. In terms of romantic identities, though, of imitations and of stylisations, the career of the ...”

“... died. Relations with Brown’s second wife, Emma, and her children were always tense. As a young woman, Lucy worked as an apprentice in her father’s studio. Her work was competent, and might have improved, but her health was always fragile. Despite the steady encouragement of her husband, marriage and motherhood put a stop to her progress as a ...”

“... in Hollywood, but none of his scripts was ever produced. He worked as a speech-writer for Robert Kennedy, a career cut short by JFK’s assassination. Recently, there has been a considerable resurgence of interest in his writing, previously limited to a small but dedicated following among writers such as Richard Ford, Stewart O’Nan and Michael ...”

“... How do we want our judges to make their decisions? Robert Jenrick, shadow justice minister for the Tories until his defection to Reform in January, told the Conservative Party Conference last year that ‘judges who blur the line between adjudication and activism can have no place in our justice system.’ Judicial activism is a habitual complaint of those on the right when legal decisions don’t go their way ...”

“... years’. In Newsweek, Walter Shapiro found it ‘the best aide’s-eye view of politics since Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men’. In the New Republic, Matthew Cooper, after revealing (‘full disclosure’) that he himself is now dating Mandy Grunwald, who held the position in the Clinton campaign of the novel’s sexy heroine Daisy ...”