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“... bravely in the summer of 1924, when the epistolary flirtation that Brittain had struck up with Gordon Catlin, a politics lecturer at Cornell, suddenly flowered into an engagement. ‘I love you in a way that part of me has become part of you. When you are troubled, so must I be, whether I like it or not. When you are happy, part of me is happy, whatever ...”

“... century or so, but the 2013 calamity – part of a series of floods that wracked Britain that winter – was portrayed by the government and media as an outrider of man-made climate change. And yet the government response was broadly the same as in 1953: money was rushed into building new flood defences. The best – a cynic would say the only – way for ...”

“... to hurt another like this’) drove her into a safe marriage with a Princeton Chaucer scholar, Gordon Gerould, in June 1910. Professor Gerould’s son, in an interview with Mainwaring, summed Fullerton up as ‘a con man’. In the month Katharine got married, Fullerton asked Edith Wharton for his ‘freedom’. ‘You are as free as you were before we ...”

“... played Miss Marple’, is present. Also namechecked are Patricia Hodge, Simon Russell Beale, Giles Gordon (once Moorcock’s literary agent), Andrea Dworkin and Iris Murdoch, who ‘sat smiling into the middle-distance while Felix Martin explained the H-bomb to her’. What Moorcock is doing, under the permission of a work of fiction, is contriving a ...”

“... as fifty of them at a time, on the floors of damp and freezing tar-boiling sheds in the middle of winter. By 1940 lascars made up more than a quarter of the Merchant Navy. A large proportion of them came from the Sylhet area of what is now Bangladesh. They had the lowliest jobs. They were engine-room hands: bunkermen who stuffed coal into the ...”

“... of a maddening case of dermatitis.) Maybe because my psoriasis has flared up so badly this past winter – every morning when I woke up in San Diego I discovered a drift of huge white flakes on the pillowcase – I have developed an unwholesome interest in the epidermal problems of historical figures. My mother says my skin ailments are identical to ...”

“... a Scottish heritage, with a military ancestor boasting the glory of having been killed alongside Gordon in the Battle of Khartoum. Although Saxon and raised in Leipzig, he knows holidays in Rome as well as summers in East Prussia. Martin’s natural father had been a world-famous orchestra conductor (and sometime composer – in Proustian fashion, we owe the ...”

“... to concoct it. Tony Blair has repeatedly insisted that the diplomatic manoeuvres of the autumn and winter of 2002-03 were not intended to serve as a pretext for armed intervention in the spring, but were genuine attempts to avoid their use of force by persuading Saddam to disarm peacefully. It is not possible to demonstrate that this is a lie, but it remains ...”

“... such statistics all too vivid. Eight months after D Day, one company of the 2nd Battalion of the Gordon Highlanders had just three men left out of the 115 who had landed in Normandy. But desertion and ‘combat exhaustion’ were rare as British troops in this sector moved through the Reichswald on Germany’s border with Holland. This was perhaps because ...”

“... principally for their skill at chess. One of them, another Kingsman, was Alan Turing, who, with Gordon Welchman of Sidney Sussex, was foremost among those who decoded Ultra, encyphered on the Enigma machine, and, perhaps more than any single person, helped to save us from defeat in the battle of the Atlantic. When suddenly Japanese linguists had to be ...”

“... UN ambition for some states to spend 0.7 per cent of GDP on aid. Others are still up for debate. Gordon Brown recently revived the idea of abolishing the House of Lords. One of Benn’s biggest goals was realised in 2020, when the UK left the EU.The 1983 manifesto was so long and so Bennite because of the party’s right. John Golding, self-described ...”

“... desired to escape. The regime under which I grew up reserved the cinema for two sorts of occasion: winter, and rainy afternoons. Winter came round with its own relentlessness, and it began on the day when the clothes I had been wearing for the past few months (aertex shirts, khaki shorts, cotton underpants) were, without any ...”

“... the British Communist David Crook who did most of the spying on the Orwells – and, according to Gordon Bowker in his biography of Orwell, Crook went on to suggest that Eileen was having an affair with Kopp. The snakepit from which the Orrs scrambled when they left for France was deep and dangerous. Like many of their kind, they never quite put it behind ...”

“... school holidays I saw more of her: we’d go frequently to Wembley Pool in the summer and in the winter she’d take me with her to the West End once a week, to shopping at Selfridges and tea at the Cumberland or the Regent Palace, often together with some gentleman friend. In the evening she’d go out to the pictures or the theatre or a whist drive or a ...”

“... for the music. When, at the end, he simply thanked everyone and announced a forthcoming series of winter concerts, he unleashed what one journalist described as ‘an almost hysterical outburst from the packed crowd’. Writing soon after in the Radio Times, Sargent described the promenaders’ antics as being no more than a ‘mild rag’. Nevertheless, the ...”