“... man’. Clara Saint, however, spoke to the French border police, one of whom happened to be a White Russian. Plain-clothed officers took up position close to where Nureyev was sitting with his minders. All he had to do was go up to them and ask for freedom, which he duly did. There was a brief tug-of-war, with Nureyev in the middle, until the French ...”

“... not only on one politician or party, and least of all on the Civil Service and the executive. Peter Jenkins of the Guardian was the first to get it right, when he told a protest rally: ‘This is Parliament’s war!’ The end of the Falklands affair was not difficult to condemn either. The problem of the islands had been rendered far more ...”

“... as revealing as they seem. He may have been inspired by the multiple narrators of The Woman in White: like witnesses presenting their evidence the characters contradict and expose themselves. Agatha Christie’s famously unfair mystery, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, is written as a diary, proving just how unreliable ‘honest’ narrators can be. Sayers ...”

“... to be rich: ‘I already owned five fur coats,’ she wrote in her memoir, ‘so I ordered a white mink, floor length, and wore it with pleasure, even if it did make me look like I was rolling along on casters.’ Despite which, as she discovered, she was being paid less than her male colleagues. Muriel meanwhile battled on against headaches, depression ...”

“... This summer​ , a new monument appeared in Budapest’s Liberty Square. Amid a copse of truncated white marble pillars stands the metal figure of a slender young man. Wrapped from hips to feet in windswept drapery, he opens his arms to the sky. In his right hand he bears the orb of political authority surmounted by the Hungarian double-barred cross ...”

“... watching his daughter Flavia beneath a ‘dark and contingent cedar tree … sitting on a white wooden seat, in her unutterable otherness, her pet marmoset on her shoulder, her cap of auburn hair shining like burnished gold on her head. Nearer to the house, in the rose-garden, their younger daughter, seven-year-old Perdita, strange, mysterious and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... areas should be attached to museums, where the categories of objects the museum contains (‘white man’s art’ and so on), the ‘jobs and personalities’ of their donors and the curricula vitae of the staff will be spelt out to the visitor. Key works should be isolated in rooms with tiered seating. He is indignant because, in labels ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... habits have always been less compartmentally neat than the publishing historians would like. Take Peter Mann’s startling discovery, made some twenty years ago, that the main patrons of Mills & Boon were university-educated women, consciously slumming. This was in line with an almost exactly simultaneous finding by a Presidential commission in America that ...”

“... its activities, Edward Heath spoke up for it in the House of Commons. In 1969, it was natural that Peter McLachlan, at the time administrator of the NYO and later active at Conservative Central Office, should invite the then Leader of the Opposition to visit the orchestra on its Easter holiday course at a minor public school in Ramsgate, just down the road ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... upheavals – were linked, and should be treated in tandem. And while Palmer concentrated on white revolutionaries, in his 1938 classic, The Black Jacobins, C.L.R. James successfully revived interest in the slaves and free blacks active in Saint-Domingue’s revolution in 1791. Arguing that liberty, equality and fraternity meant even more to the enslaved ...”