“... the most dubious morality. Building on the classic image of Walsingham as spymaster established by James Anthony Froude’s History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Defeat of the Spanish Armada (1856-70), his early 20th-century biographers, Sidney Lee and Conyers Read, presented him as an astute and distinguished patriot who laid the foundations for ...”

“... scandal was just one among several writerly modes. Two years after her death, her former associate James Ralph wrote The Case of Authors by Profession or Trade, Stated, a landmark treatise about literary property and professional authorship in the post-patronage marketplace. If Haywood is exemplary of anything now, it’s not dashed-off erotica with a life to ...”

“... photographs, objects and clothing relating to pregnancy from the 15th century to the present, Edward Burne-Jones’s Annunciation (1876-79) shows the Virgin receiving news of her pregnancy from the Angel Gabriel. This (the First Joyful Mystery) preoccupied me from the age of nine or ten. I may not have got my period, I may have been years from letting any ...”

“... child with a receding chin and a you-leave-me-alone-or-I’ll-bite-you complex’. Her father, Edward O’Connor, was an estate agent, and she grew up in a four-storey house in Savannah, Georgia, but she seems to have chafed against the gentility of her surroundings. ‘I was born disenchanted,’ she later said. Aged ten, she wrote a book called My ...”

“... and targeting’. Surveillance comes for us by sea as well as by land and air, and in the wake of Edward Snowden’s leak of National Security Agency documents, Paglen turned to this domain. In two series, titled Cable Landing Sites and Undersea Cables (both 2015-16), he aimed his camera at ‘choke points’ where physical bits of the security network are ...”

“... Wall is Robin Birley, not Robert; William III’s historiographer was Thomas Rymer, not Edward; it was in the ruins of the Capitol, not the Colosseum, that Gibbon conceived the idea of the Decline and Fall; and Rothesay is not an island. It would be wrong, however, to allow pedantic irritation to mar one’s enjoyment of this wonderful compendium of ...”

“... New styles of architecture, new styles of advertising, also signalled the change of heart. Edward Bernays, Freud’s nephew, became the presiding genius of Madison Avenue; he made cigarette advertising sexy, and persuaded women to smoke Lucky Strikes. The age of euphemism gave way to the age of dysphemism; sex, suppressed by the matriarchs, came out ...”

“... named for Jimmy Angel, the bush-pilot who should, from his photograph, have been played by Edward G. Robinson. There he is, hard-bitten and broke as usual, cooling his heels in a Panama hotel lobby, when one J.R. McCracken sidles up with news of a river of gold in Venezuela he wants to be flown to. They get there and pan out a quick 75 lbs. McCracken ...”

“... Sahlins) are followed by a composite chapter on the younger (now middle-aged) generation of James Clifford and George Marcus, co-editors of Writing Culture. Here the tone changes. Up to this point Kuper has been gently expository, sounding like a veteran crowd-pleasing lecturer who assumes little prior knowledge, makes no pretence of originality, and ...”

“... certainly not ‘in our days’ have been ‘sufficient for the OM’. One begins to feel that Edward VII had a lot to answer for in creating an order so pointlessly to stir the ambitions of the elderly. The Dons is not all eulogy. Annan sees the ‘sublime self-satisfaction’ of donnishness as a major ingredient in its gradual decline; and he has some ...”

“... on all charges. Ascribing their politics to ‘a warped understanding of sociology’, Mr Justice James sentenced the four to ten years’ imprisonment, reducing Prescott’s 15-year sentence to match. By this stage, supporters were going round London with badges proclaiming ‘I am a member of the Angry Brigade,’ and Time Out was running as front-page ...”

“... operator – actually his mother (played by Lansbury), the wife of the McCarthyite Senator Iselin (James Gregory) – Shaw is set to assassinate the Presidential appointee at Madison Square Garden, clearing the way for her husband’s ascendancy. The film doesn’t give much of an explanation – the book is no better – for the Lansbury character’s embrace ...”

“... Syriac and Aramaic, with Latin translations, printed in Antwerp between 1568 and 1573; or John James Audubon’s Birds of America (1827-38) with its 435 hand-coloured, life-size prints; or The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer printed in 1896 at William Morris’s Kelmscott Press (‘a pocket cathedral’, according to ...”

“... book on the KGB and fairly early in Harlot’s Ghost its eponymous figure, ‘Harlot’, a James Angleton composite, says of the Agency that ‘our real duty is to become the mind of America.’ How else to link the Mafia, Marilyn Monroe, the media, the Congress, Hollywood and all the other regions of CIA penetration? ‘The mind of America’. A ...”

“... Edward Said’s Orientalism, published in 1978, gave intellectuals and writers from once colonised nations (themselves often migrants, like Said) a language that liberated and shackled in almost equal measure. Said’s critical perspective gave both Europeans and non-Europeans a shrewder and more unillusioned sense of the subterranean ways in which power operated through the cultures of empire, and is now so familiar that it’s easily taken for granted ...”