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“... that was it.’ Understandably, given Koestler’s eminence and the attitudes of the time, Craigie took no action on the assault, and did not even tell her husband; in fact, she was to keep the secret for half a century. Craigie believed Koestler’s behaviour was of a pattern, and Cesarani agrees: ‘Koestler had beaten and raped women before; over the next ...”

“... happen’), and as a human being who must live like a man of this world under the moral law. Auden took a Freudian view of Dante, as a poet who craved for his poetry to bring him ‘honour, power, riches and the love of women’. It might have been worth Steve Ellis’s while to mention Auden as a case of the on the whole silent majority of English poets who ...”

“... see what a hand you write’ in the later version. ‘O how I was sham’d! – He, in my Fright, took it,’ Pamela recalls. Her exclamation was first ‘corrected’ to ‘O how ashamed I was!’ and then removed completely. Yet, in its clumsiness and incorrectness, it more accurately conveys Pamela’s sense that she has done nothing wrong, though she is ...”

“... L’Insurgé is dedicated ‘To the dead of 1871. To all those victims of social injustice who took up arms against a crooked world and formed the great federation of sorrow beneath the flag of the Commune.’ This third volume in fact serves as a memorial to the ultimate and most terrible of the defeats Vallès had met with in his life, when the Paris ...”

“... and they were ordered to get out of their vehicle. Soldiers were already shooting. The two of them took immediate cover behind a cement wall. The father waved to show they were there and was shot in the hand. A little later Muhammad was shot in the foot. The father now shielded his son with his own body. More bullets hit both, and the boy was killed. Doctors ...”

“... a guarantee of $29 billion against the bank’s mortgage liabilities – basically, the government took on the risk of the dodgy mortgages, in order to make the rest of the bank viable for purchase. They did so because they were worried about the risk to the rest of the banking system if Bear Stearns collapsed and a ‘chaotic unwinding’ of the financial ...”

“... little to say to his rare visitors and he gave no interviews of substance. As US-China relations took a new turn following Nixon’s decision to enlist Beijing’s services in the Cold War, Chiang became an irrelevance. A number of important books have been written about Nationalist China since the 1970s – among them Lloyd Eastman’s The Nationalist Era ...”

“... generally agree that several dozen Jews were killed. Because Davies is writing about an event that took place in 1944, he doesn’t need to give much attention to Polish-Jewish relations. By that point the Warsaw Ghetto had been razed, and its more than 500,000 residents killed, some of them in the death camps, others in the fighting. At most, several thousand ...”

“... through a love of words and thirst for fame. The celebrated episode that triggered the telegram took place on 7 October 1955 in the cramped confines of the Six Gallery, an auto-repair shop at Union and Fillmore in San Francisco. Five poets performed. Kenneth Rexroth, the consigliore of radicalism, was master of ceremonies. Jack Kerouac, too self-conscious ...”

“... Stalinist stalwart of the CPGB, later authoritarian and ever-loyal Blairite home secretary, John Reid. An hour later, as I’m leaving, the following conversation takes place: Reid: Halloo. Me: Glad you jumped ship in time? Reid: I left after Blair resigned. Last three years and Broon a total disaster. Me: I agree. But you think Blair would have ...”

“... is the 16th book about Laurence Olivier, and his foreword tells of two more biographers, John Cottrell and Garry O’Connor, too intent on their own deadlines to discuss their common quarry with him. All this activity may puzzle the lay person. Holden’s final pages report Olivier alive, as well as can be expected at 81, residing tranquilly in the ...”

“... of the expedition’s other climbers were British, as was its finance, and its leader, Colonel John Hunt (now Baron Hunt of Lanfair Waterdine and a Knight of the Garter) was on secondment from the British Army. On descending, Ed Hillary, as he is universally known, shouted to his fellow New Zealander George Lowe, another climber of great ...”

“... the obligation of men to perform their political covenants. And it was there that the Levellers John Wildman and Maximilian Petty mounted the fundamental challenge to the constitution that would be rewarded by the abolition of monarchy and the House of Lords two years later. Even the sophisticated qualifications of modern scholarship, which have dwelled on ...”

“... actor. Carole Lombard, who had worked with Fredric March, Charles Laughton, William Powell and John Barrymore, thought him more remarkable than any of them. On screen, his name appeared as James Stewart, and he worked hard at every detail. He was a canny businessman. Before the Second World War, he invested in a small airline. Soon after the war, taking ...”

“... his wife by his conversions and unconversions and reconversions to and from the Catholic faith. He took small interest in the upbringing of his oldest and most unruly daughter – ‘A child more obstinately self-willed I certainly never came across’ – and Mary was exiled from the family in a succession of more or less unhappy boarding-schools. She was ...”