“... a big nose and a dollar sign on his belly’. Roy always regretted that he’d been too young to defend him in court. He also wondered if Jewish communists might have had a hand in his uncle’s ruin. His mother believed they spread rumours that banks were about to collapse, provoking runs.Previous biographers have tended to portray Cohn as a ...”

“... the past, would-be biographers have been discouraged from poking their noses into the business of David Cornwell, the former spy who has written under that curious pseudonym since 1961. Robert Harris chose not to proceed, for reasons that are hinted at but not made clear in this book, while in the early 1990s the journalist Graham Lord withdrew under a heavy ...”

“... Of all the many tributes to Michael Foot it was David Cameron who hit the nail on the head. He was, Cameron said, ‘almost the last link to a more heroic age in politics’. In appearance, and demeanour, Foot resembled an Old Testament prophet. An impression which, in later life, his shock of white hair, the passion of his delivery and the magnificence of his rhetoric served only to enhance ...”

“... TV channel Russia Today solicited the views of Annie Machon – ex-MI5 agent, ex-partner of David Shayler and current 9/11-truther – and she came up with a conspiracy theory of her very own: ‘Hardline factions within the American administration,’ she surmised, ‘egged on the FBI to try and get them to come up with this result because of the need ...”

“... of Napoleon and the Bourbon Restoration might look like? Turn to Ingres’s portrait of Amédée-David, Comte de Pastorait – ‘a promising bureaucrat’ under Napoleon who, by 1826, when the portrait was painted, had become Conseiller d’Etat Extraordinaire. His black uniform, brilliantly set off by the red ribbon and white enamel star of the Légion ...”

“... In the piece by David Bell elsewhere in this issue, a number of lines from an 18th-century French poem are quoted fearlessly in the original. At one time, the question of whether or not to translate them would never have arisen, the editors of a paper like this assuming that a sufficiently high proportion of its readers were comfortable with French for a translation to be both patronising and redundant ...”

“... to grit its teeth and dig in its heels.’ In his 1951 campaign to ‘liquidate Stone’ (the young historian Lawrence Stone), he composed what was later described as ‘one of the most vitriolic attacks ever made by one historian on another’. Victims constantly used the word ‘malicious’ about his choice of language, and Trevor-Roper himself often ...”

“... For the final part of this novel’s first movement, our young hero, Serge Carrefax, travels to Kloděbrady’, a presumably Austro-Hungarian spa town, to take a cure. It’s 1913, and Serge is two years older than the century. His problem is ‘a blockage’, ‘encumbrances’ in his bowel. ‘Morbid matter … Bad stuff … black bile: mela chole,’ the doctor says ...”

“... who wanted me to read verses at a little morning session for foreign poets. ‘Oh, please, Mr David. We only have one Frenchman so far.’ Foolishly I agreed to pipe up if she really ran short of European versifiers. By Easter Sunday we were enjoying an ideal English summer, blue skies and cool breeze. We were feasted, Arab poems were beautifully ...”

“... and Minor Literature: James Clarence Mangan and the Emergence of Irish Cultural Nationalism (1987) David Lloyd argues that Mangan’s life ‘appears resistant to a nationalist typology, and it frames a body of work that is equally inassimilable to a nationalist aesthetic’. He doesn’t deny that Mangan often wrote for the nationalist cause, and in the ...”

“... patient is Jung’s, a disturbed woman not at all underplayed by Keira Knightley. The movie – David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method, with a screenplay by Christopher Hampton – opens with a view of her struggling against her captors in a horse-drawn coach (the date is 1904) and being delivered to a posh sanatorium in Switzerland. She goes rigid when ...”

“... back leg straight? How could the sculptor who created such finely articulated hands for his bronze David, and for the marble bust of a woman holding flowers, have been responsible for these wooden extremities, poorly adapted for their purpose and clumsily repeated? Parts of Tobias and the Angel are, however, of outstanding quality: Tobias’s lively features ...”

“... band of six men – Peter Cook, Warren Chalk, Ron Herron, Dennis Crompton, Michael Webb and David Greene – whose day jobs were with big commercial practices and local authorities. They formed in the early 1960s and over the next decade or so produced thousands of designs for ‘cities of the future’ that were highly original, sometimes on the ...”

“... explaining the construction of the world in his major work, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. Any young philosopher setting out to establish a career would be well advised to think twice before making a committed intellectual investment in the symbol. This is more obvious now than it would have been in the first quarter of the 20th century, when Cassirer was ...”

“... opinions and feelings of women, as workers, as thinkers, as carers and nurturers of the young and old, must be heard.’ Despite the wealth of material available, and the abundance of questions that could (and should) be posed, feminist historians have almost entirely ignored the modern British monarchy. Yet Queen Victoria was a woman before she was ...”