“... boosted in their inimitable manner,’ Bigland wrote, ‘and when you have met such a man have said to yourself, “Well, where is his cleverness? I could beat him myself!”’ He resolved to do so.Metropolitan Police records released by the National Archives over the last decade enable us to fill in some of the details of the case. The police, it turns ...”

“... is less a reflection of how real people speak than how they should. (This is sometimes said as a criticism of Moore, but it shouldn’t be. For readers who prefer their narrators to be drearily realistic mediocrities, there are plenty of novels to choose from.) What Tassie most has in common with her creator is a hyper-awareness of the way words ...”

“... witch’s oven and the ovens of the concentration camps are conflated. ‘Get in,’ the woman said. Hansel stood for a moment, and saw his sister’s hair lying on the kitchen floor, beside her neatly folded clothes. Then, without another word, he bent over and climbed into the oven, and the woman shut the iron door, and fastened the bolt. Corrie will ...”

“... experienced traveller. Also in the English party was the embassy chaplain, a young man called Edward Terry. Years later, Terry published a memoir of his Indian travels, and this obscure volume – A Voyage to East India (1655) – contains almost the only information we have about Coryate’s last months. Coryate was by then in his early forties, but his ...”

“... with a cat on his knee, and that I marched awkwardly into the room, stood on the hearthrug and said ‘I’m Bennett’, at which he laughed. And the laughter and the angle of his head and the smile that was so often in his eyes is how I recall him now. Freesias bring him back, too, as there were always some in a glass scenting the whole room, with its ...”

“... with the world. For a long time Modotti’s reputation was overshadowed by that of her mentor Edward Weston, and her total output of photographs was slender: four hundred images, Margaret Hooks says. But her well-known Roses (1925) sold at Sotheby’s in 1991 for $165,000, then apparently a record price for a photograph. And now here are two illustrated ...”

“... at last they allowed themselves to break up (‘I’m not a Beatle any more!’ George Harrison is said to have cried delightedly after their last public appearance), and left one wondering how they had managed to stay together so long. Dick Heckstall-Smith defines a band as ‘a passengerless collective’, but he doesn’t say ‘driverless’, and his often ...”

“... could hardly be bettered. In the sphere of analysis, on the other hand, a good deal remains to be said. It might have been wise, for a start, to cite the contemporary definitions of political corruption. In the Marconi debate of June 1913 Asquith produced six ‘don’ts’ for a minister. Three of these were concerned with the minister’s obligation never ...”

“... such as Whitehead, Toynbee, Eliot, Churchill and Evelyn Waugh. ‘It was not until it began to be said in Jesus that Peterhouse was willing to get rid of Knowles that Butterfield was in a position to persuade Vellacott that Peterhouse had a duty to keep him,’ writes Cowling with relish, and we know where we are. The parochialism is partly related to an ...”

“... revelations went on for weeks.What had undone NSO was a leaked list of 50,000 phone numbers said to have belonged to those targeted by NSO’s clients. From Mexico through Morocco and Rwanda to Italy and Hungary, across the Gulf States to Saudi Arabia and all the way to India, Pegasus had been used to monitor, harass, silence and detain. Even family ...”

“... late on in her commendably thorough dual biography. ‘John regarded this as a compliment and said he wished there were more opportunities to make such discreet interventions.’ To ‘Piper’ a building is to subject it to collage, blackout and inky, fiddly bits. As George VI is said to have stammered on viewing the ...”

“... grandfather in an epic Netflix series, The Crown, William offered only one word. ‘Legend,’ he said, as if they were talking about Dolly Parton. And that is the way the boys view their grandfather, as a one-off, a classic exemplar, rather than the mythic, intransigent beast of agonised loyalty known to their father. The Duke of Edinburgh becomes a wayward ...”

“... female genitals. I had been taught the term ‘front-bottom’ as a child. Very little needs to be said here about how stupid this is. My husband and I opted instead for ‘vulva’. It’s functional, but it does sound strange in certain contexts. My daughter recently asked me if the Beatrix Potter frog, Jeremy Fisher, had a tail or a bottom. I wasn’t sure ...”

“... its US counterpart preferred .1 r/day. But it scarcely mattered. As the chair of the US committee said, ‘we just didn’t see any difference between .2 and .1.’ The limit thus carefully derived was extended without change to gamma rays and then, during the war, to other radiations by a factor to account for the different biological effects of massless and ...”

“... and dutiful’ (George V), a threat ‘to the probity and the pageantry’ (Edward VIII), ‘simple yet sacred, mundane but magical’ (George VI) – are seen as functionally subordinate to the ‘romance and escapism’ which has sustained this up-market soap opera for so long. In recent years, moreover, the cleverly projected ...”