“... yellow sands’, in which a succession of voices discourse on the fairy painter and parricide Richard Dadd (odd that no one comments on the singular aptness of his surname). Dadd, having taken his father for the devil, went at him in Cobham Park with a spring-knife – a weapon more effective than Christy Mahon’s loy. Poor dad – or, if you like, poor ...”

“... far-reaching and, in my opinion, an extremely beneficial reform of the law’. No sooner are these stern words out of his mouth, though, than they are smilingly disclaimed: ‘Don’t take me too seriously!’ He only does it to annoy, you see, because he knows it teases. John Sparrow has been teasing us now for almost fifty years. Often the tease has been ...”

“... first tableau, the head was back on the young queen’s shoulders, and she was ready to meet her stern tormentors once again, to pit in vain her beauty and her freshness against their heavy, grown-up authority. Sometimes, amid the protests of my nanny (‘Isn’t it a waste of money?’; ‘Isn’t there something you’d rather spend your money ...”

“... be seen.’Some special forces memoirs have been so popular they have led to pulp franchises. Richard Marcinko, the first commander of SEAL Team Six, later convicted of defrauding the US government, published his bestselling memoir, Rogue Warrior, in 1992 and followed it with more than a dozen thrillers fictionalising various SEAL missions. Eric ...”

“... doing well’. Birt agreed, with consequences for the BBC as a whole. But it is also clear from Richard Lindley’s long, densely researched history of Panorama that the programme’s perceived importance over the past fifty years has been generated as much by its own staff, with their professional egos and particular working practices, as by outside ...”

“... American citizen and, by 1897, professor of mathematics at the new University of South Dakota. Richard Pipes’s The Degaev Affair is the first book-length treatment of the extraordinary lives of Sergei Degaev: his double role as revolutionary and agent provocateur up to 1883, and his subsequent life in America, a life so utterly distinct from what ...”

“... apart in age and came from different worlds. Burke was born in Dublin in 1729, the second son of Richard, a Protestant lawyer of ‘fretful temper’, and Mary, daughter of a Catholic family from County Cork. Richard Burke was a harsh and unforgiving father, and rumours about cradle Catholicism dogged Edmund throughout his ...”

“... of the war, Alsop reflected bitterly that he might no longer be able to claim the standing of stern prophet and moral tutor to the military-industrial (and military-intellectual) complex. Berlin responded in the same tones of seasoned statesmanship:I can see the thin red line, formed by you and Mac and me, and Chip Bohlen – four old blimps, the last ...”

“... wrote about what he could see through his first-floor window: the three protruding masts of the SS Richard Montgomery, an American Liberty ship that ran aground and broke in two in August 1944, a mile and a half off Sheerness beach. The ship was carrying 1400 tonnes of explosives – enough to wipe Sheerness off the map, along with Southend and parts of the ...”

“... is taken via love. Drubbed and disabused, Villon spices the miseries of the rejected lover with stern maledictions against the woman in question (‘A time will come that will quite desiccate,/ Yellow and wither that full-blown flower of yours’). He consigns his erstwhile partner to the attentions of a celebrated lecher known as ‘le Bon ...”

“... I would love to have met Orwell – he feels like a lost lover whom I never knew – yet for the stern purposes of biography I can see advantages in having no personal memories. For I must say publicly that, while each of these reviewers was able to paint in a few paragraphs a more coherent picture of Orwell’s character than I could manage in a quarter of ...”

“... his cabinet, Suu Kyi was two and she probably doesn’t remember him. Her mother, Khin Kyi, was a stern and principled woman who founded the Burmese Girl Guides, and imparted to Suu Kyi her erect carriage and mildly bristly propriety (not only was biscuit-dunking banned, she was not allowed to lick stamps, which were to be wetted with a sponge). Suu Kyi went ...”

“... political officer in the Middle East. Clayton’s successor, appointed at Weizmann’s urging, was Richard Meinertzhagen, an ardent Zionist and an anti-semitic Christian. ‘I am imbued with anti-semitic feelings,’ he wrote in a diary passage quoted by Segev. A few years later, Weizmann asked Churchill to remove Congreve as well. Churchill complied. Zionist ...”

“... to the capture of the Royal Navy’s flagship, the Royal Charles, was a humiliation (the carved stern piece is now on display in Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum), but it should be set against the destruction of the Dutch flagship off Lowestoft two years earlier and the Treaty of Breda of 31 July 1667, which allowed the English to retain the colony of the New ...”

“... and by 1953 had established a reputation as a biographer. Two volumes on the life of Richard Monckton-Milnes, the late Georgian politician and socialite, were followed by a life of Monckton-Milnes’s son, Lord Crewe. The latter was the quid pro quo for access to the archives and was, Pope-Hennessy admitted, ‘less than inspired’. Its ...”