“... an attack on a German town the mayor of which was persuaded to organise a surrender. After the white flag went up an enemy tank opened fire, ‘so I shot the mayor and withdrew.’ Haines cites this as an example of the ruthlessness which enabled Max well to mention the incident ‘casually to his wife, without apparently wondering whether she might think ...”

“... was the ‘repatriation’, through a misunderstanding of the Yalta agreement, of thousands of White Russians who were not Soviet citizens and who should not have been sent to their certain death at the hands of Stalin. Even worse was the handing-over to the Yugoslav victors of thousands of anti-Communist Chetniks, who had at least initially fought the ...”

“... of spin’, have had much claim to democratic plausibility. One was Herbert Morrison, Peter Mandelson’s grandfather, now best remembered for the Festival of Britain. Well before then he ran the LCC in the Thirties, presiding over a coalition of trades-unionists and educated Hampstead women with Blairite discipline and Tammany-Hall ...”

“... Australia’s most celebrated historian, Manning Clark, and its most celebrated writer, Patrick White. A new bitterness, of the kind that divided Britain over Suez and the United States over Vietnam, now split Australia. That Whitlam had greatly contributed to his own destruction by his indifference to economic reality – the oil price rise came soon after ...”

“... the Pole. Living things stretch their being across immense spaces, and huge energies of the self peter out in a friendly handshake with the cosmos: so the Snow-Shoe Hare meets the Moon and the White Bear embraces all the North. In Logue’s Homer, the touch of whimsy springs from an inability to take the heroic ...”

“... order to report to Major Thorold Dickinson (director of Gaslight in civilian life). Carol Reed and Peter Ustinov had been likewise commandeered, and the little group were told to produce a film to boost the British troops’ flagging morale. It was made, then aborted as subversive by the War Office; enough influential people had liked it, however, to ensure ...”

“... Lawrence recognises that the better.’ He predicted that experimental writing in fiction would ‘peter out’ and that ‘by 1960 the only surviving novels will be those with character and story.’ And he could lack the courage even of such convictions as he possessed: when Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness appeared, he confessed great admiration in ...”

“... devaluations and revaluations from time to time. According to Stephens, Thatcher, Major and Sir Peter Middleton (Treasury Permanent Secretary) all believed they could readjust the sterling rate if necessary. But by 1990 there had been no general realignments in the system for almost four years. The participants were increasingly focused on moving to a ...”

“... was unable to come to the conference.’ Perhaps Gilbert was simply busy, or recuperating from a white-water rafting or a hang-gliding contretemps. But of course the words can also be interpreted to mean that Gilbert was invited, but not offered the co-chairmanship. One must be practical after all: the gentlemen of Pennzoil might never have heard of ...”

“... however, the trend was in the opposite direction: the internal passport regime introduced by Peter the Great at the beginning of the 18th century was long retained as a regulator of movement. The Russian internal passport on the eve of the First World War identified its holders (men only) by title or rank, religion, marital status and liability for ...”

“... to the present. The origins of the Russian dacha were aristocratic: in the early 18th century, Peter the Great gave his noble servitors plots of land on the road between St Petersburg and his new palace at Peterhof and required them to build (at their own expense) suitably impressive and well-landscaped country houses (hence the term dacha, meaning ...”

“... my aunt brought Patrick to the London flat, our daughter Candy was already three months old.’ Peter Pan had the windows locked against him when he tried to go home and saw a new baby in his cot; at least they let Patrick in. But Johnnie was a journalist and six weeks after Patrick arrived, his paper sent him to Paris. ‘I went too but we left the ...”

“... days, having run away from the domestic constrictions of Portsmouth, she had worked as a clerk at Peter Jones, then in the firm’s furniture-painting studio, then as a secretary at the Medici Society, then for MGM as a reader. She used this period, the mid-1930s, as material for the best of her novels outside the trilogies, The Doves of Venus ...”

“... Doyle, who had never thought of Holmes as more than a sideline to his historical novels (like The White Company, now relegated to the children’s section of Amazon.com), pushed Holmes over the Reichenbach Falls. Twenty thousand people cancelled their subscriptions to the Strand. Its publisher, a marketing genius best known for a Railway Insurance Scheme ...”

“... of lame ducks. Sandy, his schizophrenic nephew; Patsy Healey, who had acted in his short film The White Bus and been depressed ever since. There was his mother and, for a while, his brother’s wife, and he was always on call to counsel and very often to subsidise needy friends and actors who had lost their way. I have had some credit because I gave room in ...”