“... to Mubarak, are Copts.) They suffer various forms of discrimination: senior positions in the civil service and the professions tend to be closed to them and churches, unlike mosques, don’t receive subsidies. They find little reassurance in the rhetoric of the Muslim Brothers – whose former General Guide, Mahdi Akef, recently declared that he would prefer a ...”

“... the infrastructure of settled agriculture and thereby deprive the enemy of food and fodder. Robert Livingston in the wars against the Plains Indians had the same idea. He set ablaze the grasslands south of the Platte River in order to destroy the material support of his semi-nomadic enemy; he was using a tactic employed by Native Americans ...”

“... monthly interest-free terms’. It’s the kind of puffing that goes with a royal jubilee dinner-service: history becomes upmarket commodity.With all that showcasing, the series is commonly referred to as the Bicentennial History. But in the strictly official sense it isn’t. The project had neither money nor endorsement from the Australian Bicentennial ...”

“... generally interests us only in other tribes; Bad Blood, the term the United States Public Health Service appropriated to represent syphilis to the largely illiterate black men who were about to become the unwitting subjects of medical observation in the notorious Tuskegee experiment; Paul Goodman’s Of One Blood (the phrase is from Acts 17.26), about the ...”

“... and frustration. Sidney and Greville found their progress at court, and their plans for military service in Europe and exploration in the New World, blocked by a queen who could not be won to the aggressive foreign policy of their party. After Sidney’s death Greville lost his way. The news of it plunged him into months of sickness and melancholy. ‘Divide ...”

“... traders and saying, “Buy it, I don’t care what the price is, buy it,”’ one attendee told Robert Bryce. As New York closes, the announcement comes. Enron, which began by owning pipelines carrying natural gas, is going to organise the trading of ‘bandwidth’ (capacity) in pipelines that carry information, the fibre-optic cables of the Internet. At ...”

“... With us it would have to be the loo.16 February. To St Paul’s, Covent Garden and the memorial service for the actor Ben Whitrow. Mindful of similar services in the past when I haven’t heard a word, I sit halfway down the south aisle festooned in hearing aids in the lee of a plaque to Flora Robson. But someone must have taken the acoustics in hand ...”

“... utility for all serving politicians, it did look a touch obvious in point of immediate self-service. And the apparently noble injunction – to consider an ex-President as a whole man, take him in the round, take him for all in all – could rebound horribly if it meant raking up things that the country was supposed to have forgotten or forgiven. Within ...”

“... handler, Alexander Feklisov, published his memoirs over the objections of the Russian intelligence service. He was a decorated Hero of the Russian Federation, credited in Moscow with having helped resolve the Cuban Missile Crisis: he figured they’d let him get away with it, and, if not, he was at the end of his life anyway. Sebba may be right that his ...”

“... War and State Departments. A month later Donovan submitted his ‘Memorandum of Establishment of Service of Strategic Information’ to the president. It recommended an organisation that would collect and analyse information and make it available to the president as commander-in-chief, and would also disseminate propaganda. It made no mention of covert ...”

“... he went along. During the war, Trevor-Roper worked in intelligence, at first in the Radio Security Service. This outfit initially fell under MI8 but was later transferred to the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) and its huge Ultra decrypting operation at Bletchley. Sisman fills two long chapters with the intricate, sometimes ...”

“... Glasgow, Greenock and Helensburgh in the summer of Napoleon’s advance on Moscow. In fact, Robert Fulton’s steamboat Clermont had started running on the Hudson in 1807, and in the five years before Bell got going on the Clyde half a dozen other steamers had begun to carry freight and passengers on the Delaware, the St Lawrence, the Mississippi and ...”

“... when he and my stepmother were moving house. The coins were in the top pocket of his National Service uniform, which went in the skip, along with a little glass duck that he kept retrieving but finally relinquished when we insisted it wasn’t worth keeping. It kept bobbing to the surface, and I began to feel guilty, so I saved it. Other things have found ...”

“... and scandal, Maintenant was entirely written and published by Cravan: the other contributors (Robert Miradique, W. Cooper, E. Lajeunesse, Marie Lowitska etc) are all pseudonyms. Even the advertisements bear his skewed imprint: the restaurant Chez Jourdain entices customers with the words, ‘Where can you see Van Dongen’ – the Flemish painter Kees van ...”

“... I knelt and started to pray and prayed for everybody I thought of, Brett and Mike and Bill and Robert Cohn and myself, and all the bullfighters, separately for the ones I liked, and lumping all the rest, then I prayed for myself again, and while I was praying for myself I found I was getting sleepy, so I prayed that the bullfights would be good, and that ...”