“... to the Purges, their outcomes were hugely different. Victims of McCarthyism (despite the Rosenberg case) didn’t typically suffer death or long-term exile, but ‘only’ reputational damage. Loss of employment was a high possibility, but the chance of arrest was small. This was much closer to the level of consequences likely to follow a Soviet ...”

“... In​ 2002, a geneticist called Jonathan Pritchard and his team at Oxford, collaborating with Noah Rosenberg at Stanford, found they could use a program they’d designed called Structure to identify clusters of people based only on their DNA. The program scanned genetic variation and assigned each individual’s DNA to one or more groups of ancestors who ...”

“... in this episode and others, the psychology of troops in battle. Holmes quotes Lieutenant David Tinker on his first experience, during the Falklands War, of being shelled: ‘They must be mad. Don’t they know it’s very unsafe shooting things at other people?’ A US Sergeant in Vietnam recalled: ‘You thought, “How the fuck can they do this to ...”

“... the secrets behind better Bombs. Success in achieving either, as the physicist and historian David Kaiser has argued, depended on resolving a problem about secrecy that was at once philosophical and political. If scientific and technological knowledge was crucial, did it come in discrete units, some of which needed special protection while others were ...”

“... to be done to explain that his paintings were not just garish expressions of his own neuroses. David Sylvester and Michel Leiris, who both wrote perceptively about his work, emerged as friends and champions. As early as 1951, Sylvester asserted that Bacon was ‘the major English artist of his time’. He soon had access to Bacon’s studio and saw ...”

“... be able to take for granted could see for himself or herself the truth of the matter,’ he told David Sexton, somewhat sternly. T.S. Eliot once said that genuine poetry could ‘communicate before it is understood’, though that doesn’t preclude understanding it too: it might seem a generous thing to say that the poetry in some way communicates its ...”

“... despatched to Prague a few weeks later, had it that Kelley went six Dutch miles towards the Lord Rosenberg, to a certain town under his jurisdiction, where he being weary, and without suspect, he reposed himself after dinner on a bed, and slept. In which time, the Emperor’s guards entered, took him, entreated him very ill, cut his doublet open with a ...”

“... much heart.Reitlinger devotes a substantial number of pages to Eichmann and concludes, in a phrase David Cesarani quotes, that Eichmann’s ‘career was that of a German civil servant, absorbed in his work and getting no glory for it’. Reitlinger didn’t fail to recognise his significance in the murder of millions of Jews but, like Arendt later on, he ...”

“... and recounting success. In Sweden Stern got to talk – ‘again’ – with Olof Palme; in Iran David Rockefeller arranged for him to meet the shah; in Egypt he met Boutros Boutros-Ghali. And in India, Italy, Poland, China and other places he met scores of ambassadors and important intellectuals. He confesses that he seeks out the company and approval of ...”