“... It is concerned with ‘knowingness’. Few works are more indisputably travel writing than Richard Burton’s Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al Madinah and Meccah (1855): every detail in his ‘pilgrimage’ – the attempt by an infidel Westerner to pass himself off as an Arab pilgrim and gain sight of the Muslim sacred places and ceremonies ...”

“... villain, who is systematically punished and degraded in the book’s concluding sections, is a white-handed aristocrat, distinguished by the brilliant diamonds that he wears at all times. Isabel’s history reinforces the point. The over-protected daughter of a lord, she is reduced to the status of a servant, and her downfall is attributed to the ...”

“... to Hastings. They were violent and sometimes cruel: when peasants in Normandy sent envoys to Duke Richard II to ask for the continuation of their customary rights to wood and water, his response was to send the envoys back without their hands and feet. The practice may have been inherited from Richard’s Viking ...”

“... combined with sharp practice. The Treaty of Waitangi (1840) between the indigenous Maori and the white settlers of New Zealand existed in two versions, English and Maori. But, as Kumarasingham notes, they don’t quite say the same thing. The Maori version suggests that local chieftains were not surrendering their sovereignty or possessions to the British ...”

“... display of anamorphosis. What appears, when viewed head on, to be a large, greyish-white streak between the men’s feet resolves, when viewed from the side, into a skull which seems to project from the wooden panel. Although most of Holbein’s surviving paintings are not signed, this one is. On the floor behind and to the left of ...”

“... CIA. The Senate had convened an inquiry into CIA misconduct, and even the fanatical cold warrior Richard Nixon had promoted détente with the Soviet Union and opened a diplomatic door to China. One could be pardoned for hoping that a reorientation of policy was underway.But almost as soon as the last helicopter left the roof of the American Embassy in ...”

“... was spoken with impassive distance – perhaps even irony – by a heavily-armed commando in the White House, as we looked down at the first, still rather scattered and tentative outbursts of revelry among the crowds camped in the night below round the Russian Parliament. There was still no hard news of what had happened in the Crimea, but by the evening of ...”

“... or almost here, and then it’s gone: politics as a dance of blind men thrashing the air with white sticks, while failing to land a single blow on a Struwwelpeter clown-king bent on slow-puncture abdication by photo opportunity, a different costume or a different country every night. This man changes the rules of the game if he is in danger of losing a ...”

“... It’s not difficult to guess where they’re making for: their new gallery, Jay Jopling’s White Cube2 in Hoxton Square. You don’t really need to go inside the sugar-frosted box to see what’s happening. You can get it from the street. This is top dollar, scratchcard art. Either it works in one hit or forget it. If it doesn’t jab you in the eye as ...”

“... CIA was a Soviet spy. After such sleuthing it is a relief to find in this book of essays edited by Richard Langhorne an article on the Cambridge spies by a don, and it is by far the most sensible account so far written. It is the best because Christopher Andrew is a historian at Corpus Christi, Cambridge who has become the leading authority on the Intelligence ...”

“... I simply forgot.’ He had added a detail to his version of the ruins: ‘a large number of tiny white skeletons scattered round about. The bones are very delicate and must have belonged, one would have thought, to small quadrupeds.’ They turn out to have belonged to the cats that, replacing the hordes of New York cockroaches, infest his imagined building ...”

“... new book, The Grass Is Greener, causes a fatal synaptic meltdown in anyone who reads it, and only Richard Anger, maverick bookseller, and Lauren Furrows, emotionally timid neurologist, can stop the epidemic. Balancing the figure of Gary, for whom subject matter is everything (he admires the Monet on his wall because the artist ‘painted pictures of flowers ...”

“... Rosa slapped on a queasy mid-tone mix of sienna and smalt blue; capped it with brisk blurts of white; later, knocked the resulting rock planes back into readable order with red and yellow glazes. But that vertical divide of his, tumbling and forking in ever crazier lurches, still retains a lightning urgency. Here you meet the gestural painting of the ...”

“... by Thomas Gainsborough, Joshua Reynolds, Arthur Devis, John Opie, Jonathan Richardson and Richard Cosway, among others. The small, unattributed canvas he disposes of in 1928 is not in the same league. But it does come with an intriguing back story. Most of Henry Howard’s family’s wealth originally came from sugar plantations worked by enslaved ...”

“... Blakey is a better fit. B. is solicitous if not saintly around my mother. Helps her fold up her white metal cane from the Braille Institute and calls her ‘Mavis’ in a polite, Boston-bred, upper-middle-class-lesbian-daughter-in-law way – much as Mary Cheney’s lover, one imagines, addresses her in-laws as ‘Dick’ and ‘Lynne’. B. played squash ...”