“... recalled. O’Brien told me that she wanted ‘their diaries, their souls’, and referred to Anne Frank. But the girls she met were ‘very shy, and also reluctant to talk’. Committed to producing a work of fiction that had documentary authority, she made contact with social workers, doctors and journalists.The real mistake​ , seen so often in travel ...”

“... the Cold War and whatever measures Washington decided were necessary to prosecute it, as well as a frank admirer of American capitalism (having made more cautious moves in this direction under the long editorship of Geoffrey Crowther between 1938 and 1956). In 1965, an article proclaimed the US ‘the most internationally responsible country in the ...”

“... by white gravefields containing the remains, among thousands of others, of my great-uncle Frank and Kipling’s son Jack, though who can be sure exactly where they lie? (The identification of Jack’s grave in the cemetery at St Mary’s Advanced Dressing Station is still contested.) Twenty-five years before I went to Loos for the centenary of the ...”

“... legitimacy of the welfare state and the expectation of social progress. But the chapter began to close in the 1970s, with the end of the ‘golden years’ of boom or – as Judt proposes – with the 1973 publication in the West of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago. (This is certainly original, but why exposure of the Soviet past should have effected the ...”

“... repeatedly refers to ‘Lord Victor Rothschild’ in a book published by the ancient firm of Lord Frank Longford) and, finally, given the belief of Anthony Cave Brown that treason is a heritable trait, the Bell Curve theory of clubland skulduggery.Yet this is the standard, both of writing and editing and research. When James Jesus Angleton, crazed and ...”

“... the maladroit interference of Harold Watkinson, the Transport Minister, and the intransigence of Frank Cousins, the TGWU leader: it was the first great set-piece battle between a union and the government. Shepherd brings this out well but misses altogether the significance of the strike which stands, as we look back, at the very centre of our recent social ...”

“... when they began an investigation into Robinson’s affairs. This was careless. Robinson had been close to Blair – the Prime Minister and First Lady took their children on holiday to his Tuscan villa – but by December, his loyalties were clearly with Brown. He had been all but finished by successive scandals. As his reputation was shredded, the Brownites ...”

“... involved with the centrifuge programme, which only gets a few mentions in his book. According to Frank von Hippel, professor of public and international affairs at Princeton and a former assistant director for national security in the White House, ‘Iraq had difficulty producing reliable [centrifuge] machines’ and ‘no [centrifuge] production facility ...”

“... select audiences, Morris observes, Zionist leaders like David Ben-Gurion and Moshe Sharrett were frank about the reasons for Arab revolt against British rule and Zionist immigration from 1936 to 1939. The violence derived not from a Levantine strain of European anti-semitism, but from the fact that, in Ben-Gurion’s words, ‘we and they want the same ...”

“... influential a recipe’. And although he achieves this, it is almost at the cost of any kind of close reading of the novel itself. In fact, one of the curious things about Svengali’s Web is that Pick seems determined to persuade us that Trilby is not worth reading – except, that is, for the cultural history that a sufficiently informed reader can unpack ...”

“... already had a powerbase there, and he embodied the connection between province and court. As a Frank married to a Bavarian noblewoman, Keila, he used the classic entrée to provincial standing. In the 790s, he had established his reputation in the office of seneschal, responsible for feeding the royal household. The court scholars gave him the nickname ...”

“... for not making clear the homosexuality of Stravinsky’s younger brother Gury, to whom he was close, and whose early death left him feeling he had ‘an unrepayable debt’. Craft makes the persuasive point that ‘Stravinsky’s protectiveness toward his androgynous friends – Cocteau, Eugene Berman, Poulenc, Henze, Boulez, Copland, Carlos ...”

“... for instance (from the Dardanelles to Dakar, to Cologne, to Italy’s underbelly, to the murder of Frank Thompson), or Spender’s lachrymose sense that his (exceedingly brief) Communism had threatened to destroy his individual identity. But fairly promptly the CIA would import such heavy weaponry as Lionel Trilling, with his banging declarations that Western ...”

“... over the still stream,/Up the hill-side’) and so brings Keats’s poem to an unpremeditated close. Carver’s poem sets about capturing the quotidian and resists the charms of art, but ends up as art anyhow. Keats is no less self-conscious, but his poem works in almost the opposite way: he is wholly smitten with the charms of art (‘the viewless wings ...”

“... and spiritual seekers who gathered around Emerson in the late 1830s in rural Concord.* At the close of that book, Fuller had begun her famous ‘Conversations’ for women in Boston, aimed at remedying ‘defects’ in her pupils’ education and encouraging them to think and speak for themselves. Under her guidance, the women analysed Greek myths, wrote ...”