“... Sobchak, any more than Putin’s admission that he was a KGB officer (he soon resigned). Putin rose rapidly to become deputy mayor, where he gained a reputation for silent, chilly efficiency. In a period of wild gangsterism and corruption, he was considered clean. Some who knew him think that he suffered from pathological coldness, a deficit of ...”

“... which Hayek was working on when he arrived in Cambridge in 1940. The opening scene was set in France in the 1790s, when Napoleon started to dismantle institutions of humanistic education and replace them with schools of engineering and natural science. Napoleon’s grand design prospered, breathing life into the conceptual monster which Hayek referred to ...”

“... is the direct source of the phrase, but Milton is also drawing on a speech made by the Princess of France in Love’s Labours Lost: ‘Good wits will be jangling; but, gentles, agree/This civil war of wits were much better used/On Navarre’. The word ‘jangling’ is associated in Milton’s imagination with civil war (the phrase ‘jangling ...”

“... Mackintosh in Glasgow, Gaudi in Barcelona, Wagner and Hoffman in Vienna, Guimard and Horta in France and Belgium, Frank Lloyd Wright in the US – of which he finds Clough, and the AA generally, unaware. I am not at all sure, either about the unawareness or about this ferment being the only one available. After all, Clough was plumb in the middle of the ...”

“... moment everything is in proportion; the next, sights brighten, outlines sharpen, the scent of a rose becomes monstrous. Frederica, who by the time of Babel Tower has fled the shock of Stephanie’s death into an isolating and brutal marriage with Nigel, eventually breaks free and makes a new life for herself in London. She reads manuscripts and appears on ...”

“... was genuinely believed to be the national interest.’ ‘I have always thought collusion [with France and Israel, which he denied in the Commons] a red herring – I did not mislead the House of Commons – I certainly did not tell them the whole story.’ The unanswered question, according to Lloyd, was ‘supposing we had reoccupied Egypt, what would we ...”

“... wrote also to Georgie, expressing the hope that she would come to Galway soon before the floods rose above Ballylee, the ruined castle which Yeats had bought a year earlier. Georgie, in the meantime, had been brought by Yeats to meet Maud Gonne and Iseult. Maud wrote to Yeats: I find her graceful & beautiful, & in her bright picturesque dresses, she will ...”

“... about the same, a little above three thousand. Two weeks later, when Trump was claiming in the Rose Garden that China and the WHO between them had raised the worldwide caseload by a factor of twenty, the number of dead in China had barely budged: the epidemic there was under control. In the US, more than 23,000 had perished. By the time of Azar’s address ...”

“... 1915), his first heavyweight novel, and corrected the proofs while serving with the Red Cross in France. There, a few months before Syrie’s pregnancy, he had also met Gerald Haxton, a louche American expatriate who became the most important man in his life. Maugham eventually married Syrie for the child’s sake – their daughter, Elizabeth, was born in ...”

“... Yeats wrote​ ‘Cuchulain Comforted’ in the South of France on 13 January 1939, fifteen days before he died. In the poem, the implacable warrior has ‘six mortal wounds’. As he nears death, he moves among the shades. He is the same solitary figure we know from an early Yeats poem, the warrior who ‘fought with the invulnerable tide’, and from plays such as At the Hawk’s Well and The Only Jealousy of Emer ...”

“... observed by satellites, have shrunk by 10 per cent since the late 1960s; the average sea level rose between 0.1 and 0.2 metres during the 20th century (as a result of a combination of the thermal expansion of the warmer oceans and the increased run-off of melt-water). The atmospheric concentration of co2 has increased by 31 per cent since 1750; the present ...”

“... spontaneous wit besides. I was working with him at the time when Henry VIII’s flagship the Mary Rose was being laboriously raised from the depths of the Solent. This was being done by means of a cradle when suddenly a cable snapped and the wreck slipped back into the water.‘Ah,’ said Richard. ‘A slight hiccup on the atypical journey from grave to ...”

“... Stuckey’s Bank, a sizeable local house which had already swallowed up several tiddlers. Thomas rose to become vice-chairman, and so in due course did his son Walter, after serving a full apprenticeship in the Bristol counting house. Even after moving to London with his wife, Eliza Wilson, Walter remained a key figure in Stuckey’s. Eliza was the daughter ...”

“... had authentic Europhile connections and antecedents. The Anglo-German Kötting made films in France and escaped whenever he could to a primitive forest house beside an old Cathar track in the Pyrenees. Barton came to Hastings from Paris, and found her inspiration, as the reviewer Nick Hasted said, in ‘charity shop glamour, Gallic chanteuses, Weimar ice ...”

“... of his studio only just sold when Degas and His Model appeared in two parts in Le Mercure de France. An as-told-to by a certain ‘Pauline’, written up in the third person by ‘Alice Michel’, who may have been the novelist ‘Rachilde’ (co-editor and co-founder of Le Mercure), it is not so much kiss-and-tell as pose-and-tell. And it is a curious ...”