“... studies. Six years later she published Réinventer la tradition: Alexandre Stourdza et l’Europe de la Sainte-Alliance, a study of the diplomat and thinker Alexander Sturdza – father a Romanian boyar, mother a Phanariot Greek – in the era of the European Restoration.2Secretary in his twenties to Ioannis Capodistrias, Alexander I’s Greek envoy to the ...”

“... a silver wire laid down along the bulwarks’ which he ‘thought was never going to break’. The man ‘who had nearly paid with his life for this little bit of useless information’, and whom the journalist-narrator had gone half-way round the world to interview, was, naturally enough, Kipling himself. In Something of Myself he remarks that he once had the ...”

“... of loyalty to the Bush family. With Abu Ghraib and Bagram and Guantánamo to think of, Gates was a man to trust. Also, Gates might help to slow and muffle the incessant pressure from Cheney and his circle for an attack on Iran. It is generally supposed that Gates, together with Condoleezza Rice, held Cheney off and gave Bush the institutional backing to resist ...”

“... offered like a boastful list of ‘previous’, is fulsome but inaccurate. Jack Spot: Man of a Thousand Cuts was not published by the Olympia Press but by Alexander Moring. The ghost’s nom de guerre is Hank Janson, not ‘Jansen’. The index is also dodgy (as I discovered by trying to check on George ...”

“... from Moscow. Francis Wheen, the author of a recent biography of Marx, made a similar point. The man had finally emerged from under the political debris, and barely resembled the quasi-religious icon and prophetic travesty of the 20th century. Jacques Attali’s book is another remarkable signpost on the same new landscape. The author isn’t a ...”

“... that are all the same length, inducing a kind of highway hypnosis; 3) a general feeling that Alain de Botton is somewhere, wearing a Dan Flashes shirt. Everything is like a riddle that an enormous snail poses before allowing you to cross a bridge. On one page, the appearance of rigour, on the next, statements like this: ‘It is impossible to be an atheist ...”

“... was a highly skilled open-sea navigator, an invaluable Polynesian go-between, and the kind of man whom Banks recognised as the local version of a gent – ‘certainly a most proper man, well born’. Cook didn’t want him on board, but Banks decided to take him at his own expense. ‘Thank Heaven,’ Banks wrote in ...”

“... finished. When Mies drew her attention to the excellence of his chief draftsman, she sat in the man’s office for hours practising mechanical drawing after persuading him to give her lessons. ‘I took my drawing board and T-square with me when I travelled, even to Paris,’ she writes.Lambert’s account is so engaging not only because it is the story of ...”

“... considers the careers of ten who made their names in the decade. By 1950 change was coming. Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex was published in English in 1953. There were increasing opportunities for women who were bold and determined enough to take them. Yet for all Cooke’s justified satisfaction in finding so many possible subjects from which to make ...”

“... which were used to cover a gap in the telegraph network between Brussels and Aachen, giving Paul Reuter a monopoly over all telegraph traffic between Belgium and Germany. The five sons of Mayer Amschel Rothschild used pigeons to stay in touch as they travelled around Europe consolidating their father’s banking dynasty. During the Siege of Paris in ...”

“... In​ 1984 Guillaume Dustan drafted a personal ad: ‘In brief: young man, eighteen, hypokhâgne, Lycée Henri-IV, short brown hair, 1.7 metres, part preppy, part 1950s greaser, not very sporty – sensual – funny, neither a party animal nor a bookworm. Now let’s see if the feeling is mutual …’ Written when he still went by the name William Baranès, it anticipates the Guillaume Dustan to come: the pointed mention of his prestigious schooling; the importance of cultivating ‘a look’ (often imported from America); the fear of being consigned to a particular identity or sphere (either the nightclub or the library) that might foreclose some as yet unknown experience ...”

“... of course, who would have the same kind of powers as the French President – the Communists had de Gaulle and the Paris events of 1968 in mind. Fully democratic elections would not be held until 1993, after a four-year parliamentary term. The reformers in the Party expected the ‘system’ to last. Stanislaw Ciosek, the Politburo member who more than ...”

“... of thought; sometimes, like Asia in Prometheus Unbound, he believed that Prometheus ‘gave man speech, and speech created thought.’ Shelley’s idealism asserted the constitutive power of language; his scepticism noted not only the habit by which a Thou congeals into an It but the fact that the triumphs of poetry are but partial and fleeting. This ...”

“... on Bond Street introduced time into the vision of souls, bliss, beauty: Hirst’s objets de vertu were ephemeral, and fell to the ground after their short span was done. They invert the usual definition of art as eternal, countering time and decay. The words tempus and temple share the same root; the connection suggests that the function of a sacred ...”

“... a Lady Chatterley-ish story of a woman, Eva, who flees an unhappy marriage with a wealthy older man, and falls in love with a young engineer called Adam. Machaty had planned a close-up of the heroine’s face as Adam kisses her and wanted the audience to be in no doubt that she had indeed reached a state of ‘ecstasy’, in Eden, with her Adam. The trouble ...”