“... On 22 May 1724​ James Logan, a wealthy Philadelphian fur trader, scientist and bibliophile, took a day trip with friends from London to Windsor. Big crowds accompanied them, and no wonder: they were making their way to a dramatic public occasion – a scientific counterpart to the hangings at Tyburn that drew enthusiastic spectators in droves in the same period ...”

“... the naughty children who pulled her hair, Queenie who spoke to bees, the annual pig killing, May Day, the harvest – but published nothing until she was in her thirties, and nothing on her childhood until her early sixties. Lark Rise to Candleford, the collected trilogy, came out in 1945; she died two years later. Even decades after leaving the village ...”

“... with my 20-minute static nakedness on the table, I decided they would have to deal with it. They may well have thought that the brief covering-up provided the patient with that assured dignity, mentioned on notices around the hospital, but it was just another formality, like my date of birth and address, that made me invisible. I put the lack of human ...”

“... he worked for a City bank in order to ‘make my pile’. He wrote to his uncle, with what we may hope was a degree of irony, that he knew money couldn’t buy happiness but that it could buy ‘cars, yachts, expensive holidays’ and security, and these things, he explained, would make him happy. He reckoned that a large part of success in finance – 20 ...”

“... politicians and those who’d taken part in the uprising for a book. I was still there in May, my work unfinished, when the invitation arrived. North Korea was even then a country set apart. The letter came via a local Communist known as Rahim ‘Koreawallah’, secretary of the Pak-Korea Friendship Society. Short, paunchy, loquacious and full of ...”

“... 2011, aged 66. Gilbert was stroke-brochure material who had led a perfect stroke-conducive life. I may have been unlucky to have had a stroke at all but it was a stroke of luck that I’d had such a mild one. Within 48 hours there was almost no physical difference between the way I’d felt before and afterwards. I was able to play ping-pong on Friday and ...”

“... to diet, through which Herodotus organised his experience of the Other. Many of his errors may be traced either to the over rigid application of analogies (as with the Nile and the Danube) or the prejudices of his informants. How far have all these investigations affected our general understanding of Herodotus, and in particular the basic task facing a ...”

“... voluntarily – that ‘further developments’ on the eavesdropping ‘theme’ be avoided, which may have contributed to other outlets ignoring it. But it was also the case that, among UK papers, it was only the Guardian, Greenwald’s then employer, that actually had access to the Snowden documents: there’s little joy in reporting what you don’t ...”

“... embarrassed by all social rituals that require me to participate in a predetermined script. It may simply be that I am not a natural actor. That would account for the funk. Perhaps, having been handed this inescapable part, I was suffering from stage fright. It goes deep. I can perform at other people’s dinner tables like a chattering magpie, arguing and ...”

“... and her class. The Balanchivadze grandchildren think she was German; Kendall believes she may have been hiding Jewish blood on her mother’s side, and was probably illegitimate. Then too, the famous winning lottery ticket that lifted the family into the St Petersburg bourgeoisie, and led to disastrous investments by Meliton, was not bought by Meliton ...”

“... where the false division between eras leads Jones into a Spirit of ’45 misty-eyedness. It may not have become glaringly evident that the police were an arm of the new ‘establishment’ until the 1980s, but the riots of 1981 had much deeper roots; the Special Patrol Group doesn’t feature in Jones’s discussion of police brutality, and ‘sus’ is ...”

“... nurtured in the Germans a palpable smugness that is sometimes hard to bear, however justified it may be. In Italy a general amnesty for political and military prisoners was issued in June 1946; there was no consistent policy for prosecuting Italian citizens for war crimes and Fascist bureaucrats and administrators stayed in office. The judge appointed in ...”

“... strong presence in the state apparatus and their extended patronage network in the provinces may be the only way to prevent the Brotherhood from winning another election. To avoid being outflanked, the Muslim Brotherhood has to find a way of driving a wedge between the old regime and the revolutionaries. Confrontation has failed, and divide-and-rule ...”

“... leveraging their paranoia into real power. Conspiracy theorists are often simply nuts. Ferguson may be a conspiracy theorist as well, but if so he isn’t letting on. In this, his fourth autobiography, he has a chapter about his interests outside football. One of his passions is the Kennedy assassination, to which he has devoted a lot of time and a fair bit ...”

“... the feminists of ‘the condom train’ staged a mass importation of illegal contraceptives in May 1971. When they arrived from Belfast into Connolly Station, the customs men ‘were mortified’, Mary Kenny, one of the participants, remembered, ‘and quickly conceded they could not arrest all of us, and let us through’. Michael Adams writes in his 1968 ...”