“... his own achievements. Here are two examples from the period covered by this book. At Mareth at the gates of Tunisia, in March 1944, Monty fought a battle – an unsuccessful frontal assault followed by an effective ‘left hook’, primarily with his armour – which ended in German withdrawal. Monty described this (in a letter to Brooke, which Hamilton does ...”

“... ministers scurried into the City to seek out millionaires to conduct the Government’s business: David Simon from BP, Martin Taylor from Barclays Bank, Peter Davis from the Pru, even that devoted Thatcherite Alan Sugar of Tottenham Hotspur. Past Labour Governments had made some small effort to assert their democratic rights over unelected financial power. In ...”

“... all he had seen of the actual enterprise was the flow of doomed reinforcements passing the camp gates (and, one day, the sight of a magnificent turn-of-the-century locomotive by Krauss of Munich, complete with cow-catcher). The carefully drawn map convinced the Kempeitai, the secret police, that he was a spy, since they did not recognise such a thing as ...”

“... murderous vaccines’; the World Health Organisation in league with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in a ‘transnational group of bad actors’; ‘Dear Friends, Sorry to Announce a Genocide’. And it’s been no better since Wolf was allowed back on ‘X’, as we must now call it after Elon Musk took over Twitter. ‘Ed Dowd Reveals ...”

“... and outside of churches. Images of the Virgin and saints also decorated public buildings, city gates, private houses and even street corners. Their ubiquity underlined the idea that the faithful on earth belonged to a much larger community which also embraced the dead in purgatory and the saints already in heaven, not to mention innumerable angels of ...”

“... during the Cuban crisis Macmillan kept sending telegrams to Washington which his own Ambassador, David Ormsby-Gore, tore up, describing them as ‘practically incomprehensible’ and ‘wholly out of order’. Cradock doesn’t see Cuba as a Kennedy triumph – JFK used brother Bobby’s backchannel route to the Soviet Ambassador, Anatoly Dobrynin, to ...”

“... invisible from the road, its presence marked only by a dilapidated octagonal lodge beside rusty gates. Who knew what relics of its former chatelaine’s Shakespearean activities the place might conceal? An unaccustomed peep into Debrett’s Peerage revealed that Christ Church, the Oxford college to which I was then attached, was the one attended by ...”

“... at the dilapidated Hillsborough Stadium in Sheffield. The officer in charge, chief superintendent David Duckenfield, was grossly underprepared. When a crush developed at the entrance for Liverpool fans shortly before kick-off, Duckenfield refused to delay the start time, but belatedly opened one of the exit gates, letting ...”

“... can be exaggerated, faked or feigned,’ the psychologists Peter Halligan, Christopher Bass and David Oakley wrote in their introduction to a collection of essays from 2003 titled Malingering and Illness Deception. Medical professionals, researchers and even courts, they went on, were often reluctant ‘to entertain the label or to stigmatise individuals as ...”

“... feathers. ‘Distinction in garments’ was, they argued, invidious. Much later, Jacques-Louis David, the artist most identified with the revolution, was asked to come up with an alternative for parliamentarians, a costume that would evoke the dignity of the Greek and Roman republics. The result was a complicated outfit, involving tights, tunics and ...”

“... like Angleton in the room. When he wanted someone to understand the Monster Plot – someone like David Blee, for example, who took over as chief of the Soviet Bloc Division in the CIA’s clandestine wing in 1971 – Angleton would schedule time for ‘the briefing’. He didn’t tell Blee what it was all about in twenty minutes: he walked him through ...”

“... describes is a traveller’s nightmare: Englishness lost, identity cancelled, fatal infection,’ David Seabrook writes of Thomas De Quincey. Of himself, the dole-queue De Quincey, making a high-velocity, long-term progress through the Isle of Thanet. More speed, less haste: Seabrook is a master of the throwaway put-down, a speculator in tachist ...”

“... and has given rise to great unease, even evasiveness, among liberal commentators in Israel. David Shulman’s afterword to this edition is an impressive exception. Khirbet Khizeh is an Arab village, which is captured – more or less without a fight – by a detachment of Israeli soldiers in the 1948 war. (The word khirbah in Arabic, like the Hebrew ...”

“... wistfully of seeing Len Hutton in his prime, captained a team called the Gaieties XI. Simon Gray, David Hare and Ronald Harwood are or were known to be keen on the game, too. And Tom Stoppard, another follower, has a striking set-piece in The Real Thing in which a playwright, explaining dramatic technique, says: ‘What we’re trying to do is to write ...”

“... wore the face of American nationalism, did the global Olympic village have an enemy guarding its gates or merely another voyeur? It was difficult not to see the bombing as retribution for the extraordinary self-promotion that brought the Olympics to Atlanta and, to the consternation even of American journalists, dominated the competition. In violation of ...”