“... before us lies the open grave?Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!Many scholars date the beginning of the Harlem Renaissance from the original publication of ‘If We Must Die’ in the radical journal, the Liberator, in 1919.The new racial consciousness of the 1920s coincided, of course, with the ...”

“... of halting our feud. I can still picture this doomed pact in its red frame, briefly hanging on the wall. To my shame, I was the one who repudiated it, ripped it from its frame and angrily erased my signature, before recommencing hostilities. In a way, the treaty has remained broken ever since. Yet five decades on, things are starting to thaw. Peter and ...”

“... de Marie occupied a vast Gothic pile, decorated throughout in polished marble with busy polychrome wall paintings recalling stirring episodes in the history of church and state in Belgium. Although I can’t remember the exact subjects now, the atmosphere of those pictures remains pungently present in my mind: nationalism and piety, conservatism and propriety ...”

“... The chief of the Agency’s clandestine wing, Angleton’s long-time friend (but also boss) Richard Helms, worried that the Nosenko matter would blow up in the newspapers. He never lost faith in Angleton, a man he had known since OSS days and had trusted to protect the CIA from the ultimate Cold War nightmare – discovery of a high-level Soviet ...”

“... Jews under Vichy, as if remembering the Holocaust and forgetting Algeria went hand in hand.If the wall of denial has crumbled, it is in no small part thanks to the work of historians such as Raphaëlle Branche, who in 2001 published a doctoral thesis, La Torture et l’armée pendant la guerre d’Algérie, based partly on interviews with former ...”

“... German victory, literally sacrificed himself to the SS so that his family, huddled behind a false wall, would escape discovery. The eight-year-old Serge survived the rest of the war in hiding in the Upper Loire, where, he says, ‘the Gestapo had no antennae.’ The greater part of French Children of the Holocaust consists of an album of pictures of the ...”

“... Dennis Potter’s sexually provocative and formally challenging Singing Detective (1986) and Richard Eyre’s film of Charles Wood’s anti-Falklands Tumbledown (1988). When a newly aggressive ITV, freed from its franchise limitations by the 1990 Act, decided to make popular drama its flagship audience puller, BBC drama was faced with an unprecedented ...”

“... discipline, to check the danger of the Union unravelling amid tensions over the fallout of the Wall Street crisis. By November 2011, the regimes in Dublin, Lisbon, Athens, Rome and Madrid had all been toppled, helped along not infrequently by the demands of Berlin and Frankfurt. In December the European Council met in Brussels to vote on the German package ...”

“... country is theirs, but that they have to win it by daring exploits. For them, as for the various Wall Street ‘insiders’, what matters isn’t knowledge but ‘information’, and information is invariably tied to brokers or commission agents whose loyalties can be bought or sold. Manuchar Ghorbanifar, the Iranian go-between and Khashoggi colleague ...”

“... in portraits by Peter Hujar (whose photographs line the inside cover of Moser’s book like a wall of publicity stills), Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Robert Mapplethorpe, and, later, her partner Annie Leibovitz. Sontag’s post-cancer skunk-stripe hair made her instantly spottable. For those hitting the right places in ...”

“... of life behind the scenes that did make it to the screen do pay off. There is the cupboard in the wall opened by the distraught King to reveal his three pages sleeping stacked on shelves one above the other (like the Fettiplaces on their monument in Swinbrook church in Oxfordshire). The King dashes along a vaulted corridor (Broughton Castle) and bursts in on ...”

“... and who had spotted all the members of Gaidar’s group years before they became a team, and Richard Layard, an LSE professor specialising in labour markets and wages, who with his wife Molly Meacher, another labour-market specialist, embraced the reform process and Russia and moved into a flat in Central Moscow to work full-time with Shokhin. Round them ...”

“... report listed 281 known fatalities. The strikingly precise US total was later reported by the Wall Street Journal to have been based not on an actual body count, but on an extrapolation by CIA analysts, who scanned more than a hundred YouTube videos from Eastern Ghouta into a computer system and looked for images of the dead. In other words, it was little ...”

“... Warner Brothers studio next to the Harry Potter set, but they don’t stay long. Painted on the wall of the Indian restaurant that now occupies most of St Albans’s Liberal Club is a fleeting endorsement: ‘Really enjoyed the lobster curry – Tom Cruise.’Damian Boys is a former Conservative supporter turned Lib Dem. I met him at his semi-detached house ...”

“... fronting both magazines at the same time. In June 1974, two months before Watergate drove his boss Richard Nixon from office, Newsweek portrayed Kissinger as ‘Super K’ in full hero outfit, muscles rippling, cape swirling. He knew it was too good to last: those whom the gods wish to destroy they first dress up as Superman. Gewen describes the absurdity of ...”