“... in an unannounced location, on a bridge, on an elevated rail track – and drops off the edge (held by a hidden harness), then hangs in the posture of the terrible photograph of an unidentified man plummeting head-down in front of the towers, printed on the front page of newspapers on 12 September. The Falling Man is somewhere at the edge of Lianne’s ...”

“... Europe, would come to the Zam Zam, sometimes for the martinis but usually to be thrown out. When David Letterman came to town to do a week of shows his advance people phoned Bruno to see if he would throw Letterman out of the bar on the show. ‘No, I’m sorry, thank you,’ Bruno said over the phone. ‘Who’s ...”

“... died of before. Men dying in the time it takes to catch and throw off a cold: ‘One Thursday,’ David France writes in How to Survive a Plague, ‘sexy Tommy McCarthy from the classifieds department stayed out late at an Yma Sumac concert. Friday he had a fever. Sunday he was hospitalised. Wednesday he was dead.’ Later, there were tests. A virus ...”

“... a field’. Probably the most beautiful and attentive drawing had been done five years earlier by David Hockney, in which Auden appears wrapped up in himself and a cigarette: ‘I kept thinking,’ Hockney reportedly said afterwards, ‘if his face looks like this, what must his balls look like?’ Not everyone was struck in quite that way, but everyone was ...”

“... of the Comintern-backed ‘International Writers’ Conference for the Defence of Culture’, held in Paris in June 1935. As a result of one of the Congress’s resolutions, Brecht, Lion Feuchtwanger, and Willi Bredel of the KPD, were appointed editors of Das Wort, a new German language periodical to be published in Moscow. For various reasons, some of ...”

“... like John le Carré’s The Little Drummer Girl and Agents of Innocence by the American writer David Ignatius. In recent years, however, a number of scandals have badly tarnished the reputation of Israel’s security services and stimulated calls for greater public accountability. One of the most damaging blows was struck by Victor Ostrovsky – like the ...”

“... parties. The key portfolios in the new government went to the members of Shamir’s Likud Party. David Levy, a populist of Moroccan origins, became Foreign Minister. Mr Levy does not speak English. But since little more than a dialogue of the deaf with the United States was likely on the peace process, this was not considered a severe handicap. Moshe ...”

“... whom this vast infrastructure has (at least ostensibly) been erected. It is a historiography, as David Ingleby wittily put it, ‘like the histories of colonial wars’: it tells ‘us more about the relations between the imperial powers than about the “third world” of the mental patients themselves’. For this reason, among many others, Elaine ...”

“... of Ragnar Lothbrok’, in the other camp ‘lay a youth who carried in his bosom the Psalms of David’. And he it was who charged up the hill next morning ‘like a wild boar’, in the words of Asser’s De Rebus Gestis Alfredi, to destroy the Viking jarls. Edward Freeman said flatly that Alfred was ‘the most perfect character in history’, more ...”

“... large Jewish population, and Guillem himself was a Jew, perhaps a practising one, of the house of David. (Other versions not quoted here treat him as a Christian hero who ended his days as a monk.) Attempting to explain what they see as the quite extraordinary importance attached to Merovingian descent, the connections between the Merovingians and the Grail ...”

“... draped Art Deco dryads, fishbowl lights and heavy velvet curtains. The set was screaming for a David Lynch remake of The Masque of the Red Death. Room Three, Hotel Esperance, Finistère: a beacon of hope at the end of a darkening continent. But something embedded layers deep, mephitic and beyond redemption, was present in this city. All the coded signs ...”

“... Eurosceptic ministers and former ministers, such as Iain Duncan Smith, Nigel Lawson and David Owen. Then there’s Grassroots Out, which was supposed to bring the other two lots together. But the prospectus on offer has been muddied because the spokesmen within each organisation have had different ideas. Johnson in particular changes his ideas once ...”

“... And how strange it is at this late date to see the defunct Act in Restraint of Appeals held up for our admiration. Its passage, after all, was one of the scurvier episodes in parliamentary history. In those hectic ten days at the end of March 1533, Thomas Cranmer swore his weird double oath on being installed as archbishop of Canterbury: a) to be ...”

“... true when we are trying to untangle humanity’s relationship with the natural environment,’ David Blackbourn writes, in this magnificently compelling, vivid and often pioneering book. Its subject is Germany’s struggle to subjugate its landscape, above all its waters, over the last 250 years. But its implications apply to the contemporary world, to the ...”

“... ressentiment. And yet the workplace can be seen – at least in retrospect – to have been held together by ‘a social triangle’. Bosses and workers grudgingly respected one another. Workers stuck together against the bosses, formally in trade unions and informally as friends. And in a crisis everyone worked together, to hit a deadline, prevent a ...”