“... at the Germans in a farm building, 2000 metres northward. Genially he needled his observer, a young captain called Peter, who needed a haircut and smoked a pipe as he studied the Germans through field glasses, and called signals.‘Drop three-oh minutes and add one hundred,’ said Peter without taking his pipe from his mouth. ‘Drop three-oh minutes and ...”

“... unlikely subjects. A taste for the primitive, the botched and hobbled. A sentimental attachment to young orphans and drowned sailors. Hayley had a considerable, if transitory reputation, both as verse-maker and biographer (Milton, Cowper). His poetry might have been bad enough for him to have been offered the Laureateship, but the ‘Lives’ which he produced ...”

“... last year, one of its readers, the Chinese cellist Jian Wang, remembered that he had heard a young Australian called Sam Lucas play an instrument that met Kennedy’s description of Hermann’s at the 2022 Queen Elisabeth Competition in Brussels. (It was on loan to Lucas from the Robert Schumann Hochschule, a conservatory in Düsseldorf. How it got there ...”

“... running a chill through détente, and nearly wrecking talks on strategic arms limitation (Ford’s young, hawkish secretary of defence, Donald Rumsfeld, had successfully called for a freeze on Salt II). Castro was taking big risks, but as Gleijeses argues, his adventures in Latin America had reached an impasse, while Africa still offered opportunities. Cuba ...”

“... started out as a swing towards a politically neutral, self-propelling aestheticism cultivated by young architects afire with the thrill of Le Corbusier’s postwar concrete primitivism.’ That is not at all the impression one gets from the earliest accounts of the style. The book that defined it was Reyner Banham’s The New Brutalism: Ethic or ...”

“... the Epic of Gilgamesh – to Iraq and Egypt. Individual billionaire collectors in the tradition of Arthur Sackler, most of them based in New York (where by far the greatest share of wealth in the antiquities market is exchanged), continued to buy.Remarkably little has changed in the global political economy of antiquities extraction since the mid-19th ...”

“... as Hegel put it. Learning is agonistic, deathly struggle. Learning is also life itself.The young Rose chose to do her DPhil on Theodor Adorno, ‘attracted’, she wrote, ‘by the ethical impulse of his thought, but also by the characteristics of his style, the most notoriously difficult sentence structure and the vocabulary full of ...”

“... was also not one of much scientific interest except to one or two mavericks. One of them was a young American physicist called James Hansen, whose 1967 PhD thesis studied Venus and came to the conclusion that it was the greenhouse effect which made the planet so warm – 400ºC on the surface, hot enough to melt lead. A probe later the same year showed ...”

“... not have any Emily Dickinson at all.Born in Cambridge in 1856, Mabel Loomis was convinced from a young age of her own ‘all-embracing genius’. Polly Longsworth, who has edited her love letters to Austin, writes that for Mabel ‘a public parlour or dining room comprised a small stage which she learned to dominate with her conversational and artistic gifts ...”

“... the Occupied Territories was to challenge the collective Arab narrative and, in the words of a young Arab Third Secretary, to view history in too ‘liberal and Western’ a way. Thus no Palestinian narrative, no Profile, no census: Palestine yes, Palestinians no. The second anecdote is taken from the other side of the aisle, where, as we have seen, things ...”

“... share price based on the number of letters they’d posted over their lifetime. According to Hugo Young, Thatcher had to be talked into Right to Buy by a desperate Edward Heath, then her leader, who’d been persuaded by his friend Pierre Trudeau after his electoral defeat in February 1974 that he needed a fistful of populist policies. No wonder Thatcher ...”