“... fight a full-scale naval war, where its sheer size would put off any potential enemy (Russia and France were then the favourites, and the Royal Navy’s ships outnumbered both these countries’ Navies put together). ‘Five strategic keys lock up the world,’ Admiral (later First Sea Lord) Sir John ‘Jackie’ Fisher said. He had in mind Singapore, the ...”

“... It was an ecstatic evening, from the royal arrival just after nine until ‘at 1.45 the king rose and I showed him to his car … it was the very peak, the summit, I suppose of social superiority, the King of England and the Kents etc to dine, to dine with me.’ (Channon was puzzled when the king said ‘I want to pump shit,’ presumably a mishearing ...”

“... a minister of finance with a secret bank account in Switzerland. No sooner said, than seen. In France, the Socialist minister for the budget, plastic surgeon Jérôme Cahuzac, whose brief was to uphold fiscal probity and equity, was discovered to have somewhere between €600,000 and €15 million in hidden deposits in Switzerland and Singapore. Nicolas ...”

“... as avant-garde. The homosexuals and pornographers, male and female, dominate the scene.’ Others rose above the gay panic, preserving a semblance of judicial decorum as they sought to relegate Sontag to the novelty department, the repository of passing fads. In his landmark zoological study ‘The New York Intellectuals’, published in Dissent in ...”

“... our bodies standing in the room they were originally made for?Connoisseurs in the 18th century in France (for a while the paintings belonged to the duc d’Orléans) gave us our first inkling of the paintings’ Italian titles – Infedeltà, Disinganno, Rispetto and Unione felice – and then later suggested they were meant as ceiling decoration. There is no ...”

“... letters? Well, he loved trees and the English countryside, and hated cars and machinery. He hated France and the French, although he did like Venice: ‘elvishly lovely’, he said. He loathed ‘that ruddy little ignoramus Adolf Hitler’, which will come as a relief to readers worried about the Nordic connection. And this is what he wrote to Stanley Unwin ...”

“... At Windsor it was the evening of the state banquet and as the president of France took his place beside Her Majesty, the royal family formed up behind and the procession slowly moved off and through into the Waterloo Chamber. ‘Now that I have you to myself,’ said the Queen, smiling to left and right as they glided through the glittering throng, ‘I’ve been longing to ask you about the writer Jean Genet ...”

“... the parliament doors in November he was wearing a flak jacket under his coat, but it was a red rose, not an AK-47, that he flourished in front of him. Shevardnadze, tired and cynical but still wise, could have used gunmen to stop him but chose not to. All the same, the danger from Saakashvili’s other enemies is very far from over. He is going after the ...”

“... ninny – a little pussy catty, a little Red Riding Hood, I’ll wear a Bee in my Bonnet, and a Rose bud in my hair.’ It rankled that their father had thought Austin the writer among his children. In 1853, Dickinson scoffed at her brother’s attempts at verse-making: ‘Austin is a Poet, Austin writes a psalm. Out of the way, Pegasus … I’ll tell you ...”

“... inflicting a sobering defeat on the soldiers of the Prophet: naval bases remained in the South of France – at Nice and Marseille, for example – but, for now, Islam was largely confined to the Iberian peninsula. A century later, the Arabs took Sicily, but could only threaten the mainland. Palermo became a city of a hundred mosques; Rome remained ...”

“... credit since he took over in 2006 – the portfolio of the government’s development bank, BNDES, rose sevenfold after 2007. Offering preferential rates to leading companies that added up to a much larger subsidy than outlays to poor families, the ‘Bolsa Empresarial’ cost the treasury about double the Bolsa Família. Favourable to large commodity and ...”

“... writing to Douglas: ‘My Own Boy, Your sonnet is quite lovely, and it is a marvel that those red rose-leaf lips of yours should have been made no less for music of song than for madness of kisses … I know Hyacinthus, whom Apollo loved so madly, was you in Greek days.’ By March that year, Hyacinthus was making scenes: ‘Dearest of all Boys – Your ...”

“... by a mere trickle of other deaths. There were no executions in 1978 or 1980, one in 1981, the year France abandoned capital punishment. If not de jure, then de facto, the United States seemed to have abandoned this, the most ancient and most terrible of punishments. By the beginning of Ronald Reagan’s second term, in 1984, however, something seems to have ...”

“... complete with Fanny Haslam, set sail for Europe again, spending a year wandering in England, France, Switzerland and the Iberian Peninsula. Borges renewed friendships in Madrid. Williamson in his biography is ‘virtually certain’ that Borges met Lorca on this visit, but it is absolutely certain in any case that he read Lorca’s work and paid real ...”

“... in Europe. Furman’s concern was framed very differently. Why, he asked at the outset, had France known four revolutions since the 18th century, and some 15 constitutions, and the United States just one of each? Could religion have something to do with it? Bourgeois society in America, he argued, had from the beginning combined exceptional dynamism ...”