“... Stewart Parnell before the Special Commission set up after publication in the Times of what we now know as the Pigott forgeries. (These were documents which quite wrongly linked Parnell to the murder in 1882 of two leading members of the British Administration in Ireland.) The Commission was a ruse devised to destroy Parnell’s reputation, and one into ...”

“... doctor (Roger Livesey) had been shot at Shere, a picturesque hamlet below Newlands Corner where we’d sometimes go on walks. Livesey watches the goings-on in the village via a camera obscura, though why he does this isn’t explained or the workings of the device either, which must have mystified most people at the time. The notion of eavesdropping keeps ...”

“... excitement but were then alarmed at the chaotic transition to crony capitalism under Yeltsin: ‘We came to Moscow as political correspondents. We leave as crime reporters.’ The ex-Soviet Central Asian republics travelled a similar path from one-party authoritarianism to a highly corrupt form of the market but – with ...”

“... and ruled by repressive regimes. Washington has sponsored one military coup after another. George Kennan sketched out the programme in 1950, promising ‘coercive measures which can impress other governments with the danger of antagonising us’. In 1961 a strategy note prepared for Kennedy by the Joint Chiefs of Staff advised: ‘Latin Americans must ...”

“... the Great Tradition, texts as unlike each other, and as unlike Emma, as Pilgrim’s Progress and W.H. Hudson’s Green Mansions. No one’s arguing about Emma. But Pilgrim’s Progress is an allegorical dream-vision; while Green Mansions (a story set in the forests of western Guyana featuring a female spirit-presence, a lost tribe, and enough ...”

“... find this sort of avoidance common. Also, the narrative stops at around the millennium, short of Bush, Iraq, 9/11, the war on terror. This gives it a peculiar time-lapse quality, as noticeable in its pop references as in its thoughts on bombs and bombing: who, since the massive record release and tour of 2004, could now think of Smile as ‘lost’? An even ...”

“... for New Yorkers: an empathic connection was forged with many families of the victims, and Governor George Pataki, perhaps the biggest fish in this particular pond (he controlled the selection of the LMDC), also swallowed it, hook, line and sinker. Eventually, two finalists were announced: Libeskind and Think (Viñoly, Frederick Schwartz, Ken Smith and Shigeru ...”

“... helping the Iraqi people obtain clean water, reliable electricity or competent healthcare.’ The Bush administration has decided to provide no more reconstruction funds. The auditors who have discovered Iraq’s deepening financial crisis have been ignored. They asked the US ambassador and the US military commander in Iraq for their views. Neither ...”

“... Fidel Castro, but Cuba was isolated, having lost its Soviet Bloc trading partners. By June 1990, Bush père could claim that a ‘rising tide of democracy, never before witnessed in this beloved hemisphere’ would soon make possible a ‘free trade zone stretching from the port of Anchorage to Tierra del Fuego’. Latin America’s conversion to free trade ...”

“... accountable is Housman’s humour, and how it can constitute a kind of undercover language, or bush telegraph. Humour is a product of the involuntary, and seems to go with the things that came into his head, even when these have his most memorable kinds of beauty. From far, from eve and morning       And yon twelve-winded sky, The stuff of life to ...”

“... to himself all credit for any success achieved under his command. I expected, therefore, when we sat down after dinner, to be both bored and embarrassed, and perhaps at length. And, indeed, the speaker did at once begin by talking about himself. But after a short time I found that I was seized with silent laughter. Why, I wondered, had no one ever said ...”

“... Piping Rock Club in Locust Valley, New York, Porter lost his stirrups when his horse spooked at a bush and fell on him, crushing both his legs. He gave his crippled legs nicknames: ‘Josephine’ was the obliging left one; the right, ‘Geraldine’, ‘a hellion, a bitch a psychopath’, was amputated mid-thigh in 1958. The accident was defining of ...”

“... to Fanny Burney. She was swept, as Second Keeper of the Robes, into the train of Queen Charlotte, George III’s wife, when she too was in her thirties and famous as the author of two bestsellers, Cecilia and her rumbustious, read-on first novel, Evelina, which Oxford has now reissued as a World’s Classics paperback. The potential for psychological delicacy ...”

“... corporate democracy’. This revolt against the era and ethos of the CBCs (Bill Clinton, Blair, Bush Jr, Brown, Cameron and Hillary Clinton) offered the giddy prospect of ‘a jailbreak from the old order’, filling its supporters with ‘energy and glee’. Barnett respects ‘the audacity of those I know who voted to Leave. They are not racists, they are ...”

“... in Britain and who died, unsung, in exile. In trying to understand the historical Mackintosh, we have to deal both with the commercialisation of his legacy – the ‘Mockin’tosh’, as Murray Grigor termed it, that fills the shops – and the tendency to see him as a lone figure instead of a man who, like all great artists, did not just borrow but ...”