“... start work on tests more than a week earlier, but China sat on it.At a press conference in April, Michael Ryan, the WHO’s emergencies chief, revealed that the WHO had first learned of the outbreak not from the Chinese authorities but from ProMED, a non-profit network of observers who scan the internet for disease reports. One of ProMED’s spotters drew the ...”

“... Littlehampton at the westernmost edge of the county. They sort two and a half million items a day. Michael Fehilly, Gatwick’s manager, strode around in a grey pinstripe suit, brown loafers and an open-necked pink shirt. He’s second-generation Irish. ‘My dad tells me I’m a plastic Paddy, not a real one,’ he said. He grew up on a council estate in ...”

“... and a map of Greater Romania, the perfect circle within which, according to the curriculum and the powers that be, everybody lived happily doing various things in various sorts of traditional dress.In the sitting room at home, the man on the radio who screeches on and on from Berlin doesn’t like the map, and wants to change it so that he has more ...”

“... as host because Fifa thought it less likely to exploit the tournament than one of the fascist powers. Spain didn’t enter because of the civil war. Japan withdrew following its invasion of China. Anti-fascist exiles protested at the arrival of the Italian team and abused its players throughout games. Germany’s Anschluss XI was, tellingly, divided: the ...”

“... There is no mercy for white Westerners who sided with the MPLA. In an encounter in London with Michael Wolfers, an elderly ex-Times journalist who covered Nigeria during the Biafran war and spent years in Luanda with the MPLA as a Marxist aide-de-camp, she sneers at his fatal offer of foie gras, scoffs at the fact that he was privately educated, and goes a ...”

“... and hamlets, to … the furthest reach’. Returning, she passes by the Catholic cathedral of St Michael and St Gudula, and (we are now in the past tense) ‘hearing the bell calling the faithful to the evening service, Charlotte Brontë did something strange and entirely uncharacteristic: she followed the worshippers in.’Charlotte wrote to Emily of that ...”

“... were growing up, the only old framed photograph my brothers and I ever saw was of my grandfather Michael, a hero of the Second World War. And that’s always the way he was described to us, a war hero, the man who tried to save his Glasgow compatriots on HMS Forfar when it was struck by two torpedoes in December 1940. Except that story wasn’t true ...”