“... that Britain’s Prime Minister was a man who knew, and even relished war. The same could not be said of the two alternatives for the Premiership, Neville Chamberlain and Edward Halifax. ‘I was never meant to be a War Minister,’ Chamberlain told his sisters in October 1939, whereas Winston was ‘enjoying every moment ...”

“... alternative and their use rose dramatically. They have also grown more powerful, focusing on what Edward Fishman in his new study describes as one of the key ‘chokepoints’ in the world economy: control of the US dollar. Maritime trade has always had to negotiate geographic bottlenecks: the Suez Canal, for example, or the Malacca Strait or the Strait of ...”

“... 1 a.m. he arrived at his mother’s house in Chelsea. His elder brother opened the door and Wilde said: ‘Give me shelter, Willie. Let me lie on the floor or I shall die on the streets.’ Yeats, hearing of this, asked various Irish writers to give him letters of sympathy for Wilde and called at the house. Willie Wilde told Yeats he supposed they wanted his ...”

“... We travellers are in very hard circumstances,’ said Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. ‘If we tell anything new we are laughed at as fabulous.’ This mistrust of the footloose is endorsed by the trenchant definition of ‘traveller’s tale’ in Chambers’ Dictionary: ‘an astounding lie about what one professes to have seen abroad ...”

“... Phoenix?’ Thomson asks, and answers himself: ‘Just.’ James Franco – handsome, 32 – has said many times that River Phoenix inspired him to become an actor with his performance in Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho. Franco and Van Sant recently collaborated on an art film entitled My Own Private River; it’s currently screening at the Gagosian ...”

“... The author, Louise Story, had conducted a study at Yale in which many of those interviewed said that when they had children, they planned to cut back on work or stop working altogether. While administrators seemed alarmed by the trend, the students shrugged it off. ‘I’ll have a career until I have two kids,’ Angie Ku, at Yale, explained. ‘It ...”

“... their importance, their originality and their elegance. Rabies has Louis Pasteur, smallpox has Edward Jenner. Who has heard of Peter Panum? Even the book about the institution where he spent most of his career, S.E. Stybe’s Copenhagen University: Five Hundred Years of Science and Scholarship (1979), while acknowledging his importance as a founder of ...”

“... go to the Slade, as John had done. There he knocked around with Stanley Spencer, Mark Gertler and Edward Wadsworth in the Slade Coster Gang. They went to music halls, held parties with naked dancing girls and got into fights on Tottenham Court Road. It was a remarkable time at the Slade – his other classmates included Paul Nash, Ben Nicholson, David Bomberg ...”

“... There is something to be said for the view that the subject of a biography should be dead. Death does not guarantee the truth, nor the disinterestedness of the biographer, but life surely puts some additional difficulties in his way. Certain kinds of evidence will be wilfully denied him, certain other kinds may be offered too profusely or inaccurately ...”

“... You don’t want to see him,’ said the porter at Corpus, when Charles Nicholl went to Cambridge to look at the portrait that is probably Christopher Marlowe. ‘He died in a tavern brawl.’ Nicholl viewed the putative Marlowe, in his opulent slashed doublet, and wondered how he could afford the outfit. He looked at his buttery bills too, and noted when the shoemaker’s son had money to spend; noted when (unless he was starving himself) he was absent from college ...”

“... had kept in a drawer for three decades. ‘We haven’t had such a good transfer in years,’ he said later.) Wood GalleryThe current retrospective at Tate Britain (until 24 October) shows – in its scale, its curatorial arc and its popularity – what should never have been in doubt: Rego’s unending ideas, her technical gifts, the fierceness of her ...”

“... failure of the student to follow the argument. Some disagreement about what was actually said seems inevitable, and it has proved to be so in the case of Saussure. Kirsch, however, has one very dependable witness, Alan Ansen, who was soon to become the poet’s secretary. Ansen was an exceptionally alert, well-read note-taker, but he missed a few of ...”

“... CIA unit tasked with hunting Osama bin Laden. ‘She just looked in her crystal ball and it said that he was bad,’ one of her co-workers told Jane Mayer of the New Yorker. The error was exposed in 2005 by the New York Times. The CIA completed its own review of the case in 2007. It turned out that Bikowsky didn’t have probable cause, or even ...”

“... from Poland who spent several days discussing and arguing with him decided he was a charlatan, and said as much to the Turkish authorities. They removed Sabbatai from his sumptuous prison cell and brought him before the Sultan, who devised a simple test. He would have his archers shoot at him: if Sabbatai was the messiah, he would deflect the arrows and the ...”

“... importance – that thing must be its totality – its massings,’ the accumulations, it could be said, of the marvellous mess that results from the poem’s nine editions between 1855 and 1892. The result is a textual maze of additions, deletions, revisions and rearrangements. It can, he insists, be ‘comprehended at no time by its parts, at all time by its ...”