“... For if Spials be lawful against lawful Enemies, much more against Conspirators and Traytors. Francis Bacon, The History of the Reign of Henry VII One of the benefits of the contemporary fascination with the world of intelligence operations is the growing perception that this ‘missing dimension’ which lies behind so many newspaper headlines lies ...”

“... which is famous. He said: ‘I used to have a very strong voice. Years ago, when I was very young, there was a big meeting in the Town Hall. Bankim Babu’ (the great Bengali novelist) ‘was in the chair and all the best speakers were speaking. I had to speak and it strained my voice in that hall. When I had finished, the people insisted I should sing ...”

“... line of dramatic burlesque, at the version of the interview between Hamlet and Ophelia supplied by Francis Talfourd’s Hamlet Travestie (1834): Hamlet (aside): (But soft! hold hard! I’m growing spoony, so must try the mad dodge!) To a Nunnery go! ...          (Hamlet sings wildly) She wore a sky-blue walrus in her pewter chemisette; Her wooden ...”

“... standardisation in 1960s Scottish girlhoods. Platignum Pens and the Burns Federation. Busy books, Francis Gay, Opportunity Knocks with Neil Reid. Dogs of all sorts, but mainly collies. Collies are the best. Chips fried in lard you’d leave to solidify for the next time, until it got so many ‘bits’ in it you had to throw it out; olive oil for earwax, not ...”

“... ethnicity and whatever the quality of the dynasty’s representative at any given moment. Emperor Francis I would never have been chosen as a leader by any electoral body. Keates opens his book with the story of the Bandiera brothers. Italian officers in the Austrian navy, Attilio and Emilio Bandiera became fervent patriots, tried to lead an insurrection and ...”

“... of wine o’clock. Then in 2009 she wrote a second memoir, The Last Supper, in which she takes her young family on a three-month voyage to Italy. It’s a very strange book indeed, with the look of having been written fast and to a daily word count – far too much noodling about pizza and gelati, some imprudently sharp sketches of fellow tourists, one of whom ...”

“... for realism. What about the real? In a short scene in Nabokov’s incest-filled novel Ada, the young hero, Van, visits the shop of Mrs Tapirov, another copyist: people bring her objets d’art and antique furniture and she makes faithful reproductions of them. Van has brought something for Mrs Tapirov to copy; significantly, he doesn’t remember, as he ...”

“... was thus aunt to two of Shakespeare’s most influential contemporaries, Sir Robert Cecil and Sir Francis Bacon. The Cooke sisters were a byword for intelligence and high education. Their family home at Gidea Hall, near Romford, was described by the Cambridge scholar Walter Haddon as a ‘little university’, and here they learned Greek, Latin, French and ...”

“... at Owen’s College in Manchester, ‘what kinds of habits &c I had to overcome when I was young & thinking of speaking to others.’ But he took pains to learn, and to fashion a suitable character for his performances. Dignified, unostentatious, unforced, he became the handsome, masculine face of Victorian public science, a gentleman who could command ...”

“... into conspiracy files and no shamanic visitations from crows and reeking foxes. Two ambitious young or youngish American men operating out of the same city, San Francisco, forge an alliance of mutual misunderstanding through a love of words and thirst for fame. The celebrated episode that triggered the telegram took place on 7 October 1955 in the cramped ...”

“... man succeeds and routinises the charisma of the original leader: Brother Elias taking over from St Francis, Bullinger from Zwingli, Beza from Calvin, Brigham Young from Joseph Smith, the Khalifa Abdullahi from the Mahdi, Philip Feldman from Father Kowalski and Maria Kozlowska (in the Polish Mariavite Church); or even Saul of ...”

“... J.G. Lockhart, John Wilson, Walter Scott, William Maginn, Allan Cunningham, William Blackwood, Francis Jeffrey, Henry Cockburn – are evoked, not as ciphers for their works but as bullish personalities. What Miller values most in Hogg’s fiction – its ‘intentness on a real, visible, palpable, smellable Scotland’ – is triumphantly exhibited in ...”

“... The Lodger: The Arrest and Escape of Jack the Ripper (1995). This indicts a ferocious misogynist, Francis Tumblety (c.1833-1903), an American quack who peddled a patent medicine known as the Tumblety Pimple Destroyer. (He was arrested for complicity in Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, was suspected in the Whitechapel murders, and was charged in November ...”

“... the common experience of many working-class households with a preponderance of very old or very young members – an insight that contributed to the New Liberal pension and insurance schemes passed before the First World War. Renwick does pause to mention other developments – educational reform, child welfare measures – but these three themes dominate ...”

“... thought came to me: I’ve known rivers …The poem ends:I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans,and I’ve seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the ...”