“... job for the FBI went pear-shaped when Sadie was accused of entrapment – she perhaps did entrap a young man by making him believe that she loved him and that they had to save the world by doing some light domestic terrorism – but as she tells us when recollecting the events leading up to the trial, she doesn’t blame herself. The Feds do, however, and ...”

“... source of a quotation. Smiling, the boy fell dead. Mr Usborne, really! I thought everyone knew Robert Browning’s poem ‘An Incident in the French Camp’. Young lieutenant comes to Napoleon with the news that they have taken Ratisbon. Napoleon quite pleased. He notices that the ...”

“... of farming out the office to substitutes at a profit. London was no longer infested by unbeneficed young preachers living on their grubby wits. The Morning Post had ceased to be edited by a gang of ‘parsonical banditti’ ever ready to fight duels in Hyde Park. Hunting parsons, shooting parsons and wrestling parsons were becoming figures of the past. To be ...”

“... a serious problem for a medical man with a family to support – and in saving the life of a young captain. What happened to Burns in no man’s land was intolerably disgusting as well as traumatic, and even Rivers – normally so ‘adept at finding bearable aspects to unbearable experiences’ – is nonplussed. Although by the end there seems some ...”

“... province – or the time that he spent there. He shared his country schoolhouse childhood with his young sister Isabelle and their most intense memory was the arrival, at the end of the year, of the livres de prix. They hid themselves, and read every book. But though the dreaming reader persisted in Henri, he became tough and intransigent. He was sent to the ...”

“... The earliest here were made in 1993-99 and present her own furious portrait of the artist as a young woman. A gaudy jumble of colours and scripts, with cut-out wonky capitals, salvaged and embroidered emblems, and patched pieces of journals and private messages, these are powerful works, assembled at the slow speed of handicraft to communicate cris de ...”

“... and walls the headlong career of Phaethon, whose hideous ruin and combustion had thrilled the young Piers and had terrified the young Tom. Then it is discovered that in 1697 there had been a decision to perform in the great hall the opera Phaethon, by Louis XlV’s composer Lully, but that the performance had been ...”

“... drudgery as an inspector of elementary schools?’ Ian Hamilton, the author of a fine biography of Robert Lowell, has made himself a connoisseur of the pitfalls of biography since the frustrations of his search for J.D. Salinger. In Keepers of the Flame (1992) he surveyed the legal and practical impediments: the prophylactic bonfire, the deathbed ...”

“... world, is a man who feels detached from the English social scene, Theroux depicts himself as a young American conqueror, quickly – through introductions secured by Naipaul – on hobnobbing terms with the sort of people who give (or gave) dinner parties. He seems touchingly, but crudely, pleased, to have clocked up Hugh Thomas, Hugh and Antonia ...”

“... symmetry, to 1984. The brother is romantically attached to the insurrectionary tradition of Robert Emmet, a tie which has left him and his sister on the margins of the new society. The balancing of hope and frailty at the mid-point of the century is masterly: ‘The past receded a little with the day; time yet unspent was left to happen as fearfully as ...”

“... reads: ‘According to Jo’s diary Hopper suffers from depression and frequently reads poems of Robert Frost.’ The audio tour claims that Two Comedians (1966), Hopper’s last canvas, is ‘unusually autobiographical’ and demonstrates ‘the extent to which Hopper’s work was a collaborative process with his wife as model, muse and ...”

“... Protestant and notoriously sectarian part-time constabulary. His father, uncles and aunt (who died young, having never fully recovered from injuries she sustained when a car crashed though a checkpoint she was operating) were part-time members of the Ulster Defence Regiment, the local wing of the British army which replaced the B Specials. This allowed the IRA ...”

“... him to the right Margaret and his true destiny. The romance between Denis Thatcher and the young Margaret Roberts, she of the Tory hats, the unreconstructed hairdo and piping voice, was no rushed affair. They met in February 1949, when Margaret was trying and failing to get into Parliament, and married in December 1951. Having been told by her ...”

“... associated with American documentary photography of this period (Gordon Parks’s protest shots, Robert Frank’s The Americans, Diane Arbus’s weirdos), wouldn’t be worth the film it was shot on – but it was different for Roy DeCarava. Hallway (1953) is a photo about nothing except a dark, empty corridor in a Harlem tenement: a quiet image that speaks ...”

“... outlast the Obama presidency, and if it does the largest single reason will be Obama’s choice of Robert Gates as secretary of defence. Gates worked under William Casey, the director of the CIA at the time of the Iran-Contra scandal. His nomination by Ronald Reagan to head the CIA was thwarted by suspicions of his complicity in covert operations in ...”