“... known use of the word in English was in 1230, when an Oxford street was named Gropecunt Lane. Paul Dacre, that nice man who edits the Daily Mail, has become famous in recent times for ‘double-cunting’: a colleague, usually male, will be ticked off via a thunderous, compound deployment of the Old Frisian. ‘You call that a good cunting headline, you ...”

“... itself, radically deformed.Ion-Isidor Goldstein was born in 1925 in the town of Botoșani in north-east Romania. His father, Jindrich, was a successful businessman. His mother, Saly, ran the two family homes. She gave him the nickname Izu, which he went on to adopt as his nom de guerre. Isou’s first, ongoing fight was with his father, and he found an ...”

“... the contributors are no sort of Marxist (David Marquand, for example) and two, Michael Rustin and Paul Hirst, are politely but firmly critical of the New Times thesis. It says something about their editorial style that no attempt is made by the editors to answer or even comment on Rustin and Hirst, though their criticisms are very damaging. What is the ...”

“... Danzig, Natalia Ginzburg’s divided Italy, Elizabeth Bowen’s London, Nicholas Monsarrat’s North Atlantic, Norman Mailer’s Pacific, Olivia Manning’s Balkans, John Hersey’s Hiroshima ... Among other matters, these writers record the largest, most urgent set of human migrations the world has ever seen, and the responses of the displaced to ...”

“... The documentary film The Mirage Men, which came out in 2013, begins by telling the story of Paul Bennewitz, a businessman from Albuquerque who was driven mad by spies in the 1980s. Bennewitz had noticed strange lights and sounds coming from a nearby military base and reported them to staff there, who assigned him to an agent called Richard Doty. Doty ...”

“... died in France in 1975. By then, Harry Rée was a teacher at Woodberry Down Comprehensive in North London, back doing the job he loved best. But a little over thirty years before, they had been together in the French Resistance. Harry (‘Henri’ or ‘César’) was an agent of the Special Operations Executive (SOE), parachuted in by London to organise ...”

“... the publisher who got Beckett, Burroughs and Robbe-Grillet onto British bookshelves, Calder is a North-American Scot made in England. Ever since the Scottish Scots started coming down to London with the proverbial half-crown in their breeches in the 19th century, many of the most innovative publishers have been insider-outsiders. Typically, such publishers ...”

“... the superlatives of their critics. Volume 36, for instance, investigated the Parish of St Paul, Covent Garden, and not only provided a magisterial history of Inigo Jones’s piazza, but also, in its account of the Bedford Estate, made a major contribution to the study of patrician urban landownership. And three years later, in the next volume, the ...”

“... the memorable Storeyism, ‘the shell had cracked.’ Colin Saville makes his break, turning like Paul Morel towards the light of the city on the hill. He’s done with school-mastering. ‘You haven’t any lodgings or anything,’ his lachrymose mother tells him as he prepares to catch the train to London. ‘I don’t need lodgings,’ Saville ...”

“... enrich understanding of and interest in 18th-century Britain. At much the same time as Paul Mellon was avidly seeking out the sort of Georgian art that many British collectors ignored, and Wilmarth Sheldon Lewis was buying up the letters and ephemera of the then neglected figure, Horace Walpole, a Yale historian whose very name trumpeted ...”

“... a former Nato commander; and General Charles A. Horner, the former commander-in-chief of the North American Aerospace Defense Command. Unfortunately, Schell did not interview the man whose presence within this movement might most astonish those who have not been following recent developments: Ambassador Paul Nitze, the ...”

“... and agile women (who had plainly ‘not been crippled in the usual manner’: this was in the north of the country) that he could hardly refrain from crying out: ‘Oh, brave new world, That has such people in it!’ To the resentment of the mandarins, he negotiated a curtailed form of the kowtow (down on one knee and the head bowed) when received by the ...”

“... and 1640, the Empire of the kings of Spain stretched from the Philippines to the shores of the North Sea. The 19th-century Russian Empire covered more territory and the British had a larger population, but no other European empire was spread so widely or embraced so many different peoples. This behemoth has conventionally been called the Spanish Empire. At ...”

“... perished in the nearby concentration camp. In Pretoria Haggard called in at the cemetery where Oom Paul (Kruger) was buried, along with ‘others I had known’. The diary does not identify these others, but Coan does, and provides a photograph of the memorial to a law officer’s wife by whom Haggard had a short-lived child, Ethel Rider, buried alongside. The ...”

“... What I am opposed to is a rash war. What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and other armchair, weekend warriors in this administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne. What I am opposed to is the attempt by political hacks like Karl ...”