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“... 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 ...”

“... them would cast a shade of illegitimacy over those secrets still locked away. And, as Sir Humphrey said, even knowing that there is a secret gives you some information about what it might be: you can infer something about the secret from the bits you are permitted to know. Secrets are never absolute; they’re never totally secure; and they’re never for ...”

“... to the Financial Times of a ‘long revolution’, lasting perhaps twenty years. Nevertheless, he said, ‘when you’ve run through health and education, and had another hard look at the structure of welfare benefits, then it’s difficult to see where the revolution could go on from there.’ Indeed, the Conservatives could then perhaps ‘go back to being ...”

“... The Horners of Mells commissioned from Munnings and Lutyens a large equestrian statue of their son Edward, but the villagers did not favour the idea of a young horseman riding up the aisle of the church and, finally, the statue was squeezed into the family’s private chapel. It is a pity, perhaps, that so much attention is given to the already over-exposed ...”

“... the most barefaced local restorers – Xacousti, Lambros and Rousopolis were names to remember, he said. Then the market broke: partly because forgeries had swamped it, but largely because Greek art of the last centuries before Christ was no longer regarded as the all-time absolute of beauty. Professor Bell remembered that in his youth Boeotian coroplasts were ...”

“... In Joe’s family in the interwar years, underwear was unheard of: no wonder the rich said that the working class stank. In almost every paragraph the authentic banalities of the British working class stumble through: for a childhood misdemeanour Joe and his pals ‘got a proper ticking-off’; in his household ‘literally every penny ...”

“... it must have been cooking for the British royal family (excepting the joyous interlude of Edward VII). All that would now change, no doubt, if William Rodgers and Prince Charles simultaneously arrived at supreme power: the one wrote for, the other confessedly followed, The Good Food Guide. Even gossip fragments like these are clues to the altered ...”

“... Certainly it doesn’t figure largely in the fiction of James himself, of which it might be said, along with Gertrude Stein on the subject of her home town, Oakland, California: ‘There is no “There” there.’ The other topic snaking its way through these pages is war. Before rushing to judgment, one should recall that there was a time when war ...”

“... Lewis is steeped in Goldziher. The names of both Wellhausen and Goldziher were dropped in Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), but neither is discussed in that eccentric, erratic and substantially misleading book. Instead, Said preferred to concentrate on writers like Sir Richard Burton, Lord ...”

“... as historians call him nowadays. The others are Ed, which could mean ‘riches’ or be short for Edward; Til, which could mean ‘good’ or be short for a name like Tilwine; and Bera, which is hard to relate to any known Anglo-Saxon name but means ‘bear’ in Old English. Each of the four arm-rings has been ‘treated in a distinctive way, which ...”

“... shoes. They were never able afterwards to identify which course it had been. Detailed to cover Edward VIII’s exit from the country after the Abdication, he attended a dance in Folkestone in white tie and tails, slipping off every now and again in a chauffeur-driven car provided by the Post to check whether the ex-king was leaving via the nearby Lympne ...”

“... exhibited an ‘unmistakable relish for comedy or psychiatric freak show’. Isabel Sprout was said to believe that ‘she was empress of the whole world, except the East Indies, which was too hot,’ and the commissioner got her to say as much at the outset of the proceedings. But Suzuki argues convincingly that we should not dismiss the commissions as ...”

“... his Polish mistress Madame Hanska. Custine married in 1821, but began a lifelong relationship with Edward de Sainte-Barbe shortly afterwards. His sexuality had long been public knowledge, but in 1824, after arranging a tryst with a soldier in Epinay, he was set upon by several cavalry officers. He seems to have seen the incident – and the attendant publicity ...”