“... these tend to be men who once worked as juniors in his office, having been hand-picked at a very young age. Douglas Alexander became Brown’s researcher and speechwriter when he was in his early twenties. So did Ed Miliband. Ed Balls joined Brown when he was only 27, after a spell at the Financial Times, and they have been joined at the hip ever ...”

“... fervour; but the austere Harriet Martineau liked it too, as did General Gordon, Joseph Conrad and Edward VII. Its appeal spread far beyond British readers. R.K. Narayan dwells fondly on the ‘bitter tears’ he shed over East Lynne in his 1975 memoir, My Days: ‘Reading and rereading it always produced a lump in my throat, and that was the most luxurious ...”

“... the more inscrutable – ‘other’ – it remains. Post-colonial studies, beginning with Edward Said’s work in the 1970s on the exoticised and eroticised ‘Other’, acquired its initial impetus by naming and shaming this operation; its exposure has also been central to feminist and other anti-discriminatory ways of thinking. Although applications ...”

“... And though William McFeely won a Pulitzer Prize for his Grant (1981), that did not deter Jean Edward Smith from publishing a massive new Grant (2001), which some politicians have been reading with furtive pleasure because it finds that Gilded Age Administration less corrupt than had been believed. The Conservative pundit Richard Brookhiser gave us ...”

“... Meanwhile another set of directors and actors turned to Ibsen for quite different reasons. The young Aurélien Lugné-Poe hated naturalism and devised a new theatrical idealism that revelled in high poetic meaning and rarefied expressions. But, like his naturalist enemies, he chose Ibsen to showcase his movement. Vsevolod Meyerhold opposed ...”

“... One thing the Tate retrospective brought home to me was the depth of Nash’s attachment as a young man to Blake, and to the Rossetti strain of Pre-Raphaelitism; and this helped me understand why so much from the past of the landscape tradition that might have helped him – been adaptable to 20th-century purposes – remained essentially unavailable to ...”

“... of nuance and possibility. The term ‘girl’ was originally gender-neutral, meaning simply ‘young person’: the first recorded use of the word in English comes from a poem of around 1300 which describes a crowd of ‘gurles and men’ thronging a London street. Similarly, ‘Mrs’ did not become fixed as the title of a married woman until the mid-19th ...”

“... settling at the block because of the largeness of her breasts. A fourth Cenci, Bernardo, too young to be actively involved, was forced to watch the killing of his kin and was despatched to the galleys thereafter. The affair was a cause célèbre, which echoed briefly through the newsletters of the day: ‘The death of the ...”

“... the Mitford industry revolves, lighthouse-like, between them. Nancy, the novelist, wit and Bright Young Thing, comes to prominence whenever her books are dramatised; Unity and Diana, the Nazis, are subjects for studies of British upper-class fascism; Debo, as she was always known, the châtelaine of Chatsworth, attracts the interest of architectural ...”

“... rationale for making the school syllabus more contemporary. ‘It is surely far more important,’ Edward Short, Labour’s Minister of Education, told the Association of Education Committees in 1968, ‘for young people to know the facts about Vietnam than it is to know all the details of the Wars of the Roses.’ These ...”

“... and lay down on the sofa. I did not put on the light. I lay there in the darkness. I was still young, not yet 30, but I was overcome by a fatigue that most probably comes with old age. I had cut off whatever roots I had in Poland, yet I knew that I would remain a stranger here to my last day. I tried to imagine myself in Hitler’s Dachau, or in a labour ...”

“... one too – that way Mary’s cause for jealousy would be removed. Sixty years later, talking to Edward Silsbee, Claire still put those two elements together. Pale Mary had been jealous of her ‘bright colour’, of the attention Shelley paid her and the hours he spent walking with her. After her adventure with Byron, she told Silsbee rather glibly, ‘Mrs ...”

“... the assassination of the Empress Sisi and the suicide at Mayerling of Crown Prince Rudolf. But Edward Shawcross’s pacy, graphic account of the episode is careful to show that their empire began as a Mexican dream rather than a Habsburg folly. The exiled aristocrat José María Gutiérrez de Estrada traced his country’s woes back to the death of ...”

“... wanting to change career, was accepted by nursing school, and our family – the two of us, two young boys, a middle-aged dog – suddenly had to move house. We were leaving Seattle, where we had lived for a decade, a city with ample rain, though one within range of volcanoes and earthquakes, for a small town in the mountains of southern Oregon. I put the ...”

“... consulting services primarily to governments, including military and intelligence agencies. Edward Snowden, who in 2013 leaked a trove of signals intelligence data and revealed US domestic and foreign mass surveillance programmes, was a Booz Allen consultant at the NSA and before that an agent at the CIA. Booz Allen also helped the UAE set up its ...”