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“... On the evening of 10 March 1969, Richard Crossman, Harold Wilson’s new Secretary of State for Social Services (‘SSSS? Impossible!’ Crossman wrote in his diary), reached into one of his three ministerial red boxes to find a long report by a still rather obscure Conservative barrister. Geoffrey Howe had entered Parliament in 1964, only to lose his seat when Wilson increased Labour’s majority from four to 95 in 1966 ...”

“... the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885. Afterwards, in 1887, he persuaded the police to use their powers under this Act to close brothels in Tower Hamlets. In the words of Charrington’s admiring biographer, ‘our “Valiant-for-Good” began a furious, God-inspired onslaught upon the dens of East London, which actually resulted in the closing of 200 ...”

“... All this had been uncannily predicted on the eve of the assassination. The American historian Richard Hofstadter’s influential essay ‘The Paranoid Style in American Politics’ was given as the Herbert Spencer Lecture at Oxford on 21 November 1963. Hofstadter’s subject was the irrational underside of American political culture, where ill-defined ...”

“... the kind of novel that C.J. Koch – of the suitably German name – has delivered. The narrator, Richard Miller, is lame, loses his father in the Second World War, is literary, theatrical, passive, longing to be ‘at one remove’ from everyday life, from Tasmania, where he is looked after by his grandfather, this Karl, an architect and alderman of German ...”

“... security. He’s the only one you can put your complete trust in’: thus Lyndon Johnson to Richard Nixon, 1968. It is not often that a book casts fresh light on American history throughout this century, but this biography of Edgar Hoover does just that. Not only was Hoover, as head of the FBI, America’s leading policeman: he enjoyed an extraordinary ...”

“... I am going to bestir myself in your interest – if my credit is of any value with the ruling powers. And that was what happened, for the next twenty-five years. Churchill levered Spears into politics, first as National Liberal Member for Loughborough, next as Conservative Member for Carlisle. In his wilderness years, Churchill used Spears as his ...”

“... from one grimy location to another in greater London. Within four years, however, the police powers of the newly-formed London County Council were to make such shows illegal, thus ending, almost unnoticed, a form of popular urban entertainment that had flourished ever since Pepys’s and Evelyn’s time in taverns and rented rooms and at Bartholomew ...”

“... decisions made by the Berlin Congress represented a profound shift in the attitude of the Great Powers to the ailing Ottoman Empire. In the past when there was a crisis in the East, the Powers had collaborated to preserve the Empire and encourage internal reform. At Berlin, they concluded that it was beyond salvation (it ...”

“... the meticulous administration which lay behind the glamorous crusading enterprises of King Richard Coeur de Lion in the 1190s, leaving him at least king of Cyprus, if not of Jerusalem. The Pipe Rolls of the English Exchequer, in the National Archives at Kew, are great clumps of feet-long parchment, which I remember from my research student days as best ...”

“... marriage is, in my view, a collective creation, which explains its deep-rootedness and its powers of resistance today. A phenomenon simply imposed from above by the ecclesiastical power would not have been so soon ‘internalised’, and would have been swept away more easily by modern society. The one way round indissolubility was flight. The cases ...”

“... being probed in the facility, but all that seems to happen in this line is that the agent, Richard Strickland, played by Michael Shannon with fabulously nasty relish, tortures him with a cattle prod – and loses two fingers in the process. The creature is referred to as ‘the asset’, indeed ‘the most sensitive asset’ the facility has ...”

“... When Richard Sorge was hanged in Sugamo prison in Tokyo, on 7 November 1944, I was still a student and I regret that I never had occasion to take a drink or three with that wit, charmer, womaniser, tosspot, home-wrecker, author, journalist and master Soviet agent. I had better luck with my friend Kim Philby, Sorge’s only serious rival (that we know of) for the title Spy of the Century ...”

“... R.K. Narayan has the most godlike of the novelist’s powers: to know all his characters equally well – too well to love or hate them, except, perhaps, in a godlike way, as parts of the entirety of his larger creation. Malgudi, most real of imaginary towns, is that larger creation. Like the Gods, Narayan is a comedian: the smallest things, the most counter-dramatic lives, are within his compass ...”

“... The advantages of this ‘political turn’ are clearly illustrated in a new study by Professor Richard Krautheimer. His interest in the iconography of architecture goes back a long way – he published an article on the subject in 1942. His well-known studies of Early Christian and Byzantine architecture and his book on Medieval Rome impinge on politics at ...”

“... on a budget which, according to the author of this book, would have been ‘beyond the fantasising powers’ of Punch’s founders. But the founders would have boggled at many other developments in the history of their threepenny comic, not least the fact that, early this century, it could claim to have had five knights on its payroll – two editors, two ...”