“... working on the intelligence base in Kagnew, which in the 1960s became an attractive alternative to service in Vietnam: now well into retirement, the men talk frankly, often comically, about life on the base, their sexual forays into Asmara, binge drinking or drinking to near-extinction, and occasionally about the nationalist politics of which they got a faint ...”

“... when he finally reached No. 10.’ It is thus a pity and an irony that of all Macmillan’s service in that war the only bit that is much remembered is the tragic finale: the handing over of Cossacks and White Russians and Croats at Klagenfurt in May 1945. The appalling consequences of this decision – thousands of men, women and children were ...”

“... evidence procured by Finn and Couvée, went largely unreported in the West. Long forgotten is Robert Conquest’s The Courage of Genius: The Pasternak Affair, published in 1961, as impartial an account as you could expect from someone who had been employed in the Foreign Office’s propaganda shop for more than a decade. Add to these Evgeny Pasternak’s ...”

“... the Sun in 1969, after he’d bought the News of the World from the Carr organisation, defeating Robert Maxwell en route. The News of the World is a Sunday paper, so it was a point of elementary commercial logic to start a daily paper to accompany it, in order that the presses would not lie idle during the week. Larry Lamb, the Sun’s first ...”

“... to claim their rights. You might work as a prostitute or in a nail bar, in surrogacy or domestic service, or in an unregulated sweatshop making phones or yoga tops: it’s all work, variously risky and soul-destroying forms of self-rental.‘Some surrogacy abolitionists will … mistake me for a “neoliberal” advocate of the industry,’ Lewis ...”

“... both roles himself.Lewis also fought in the war, ‘an interminable nightmare’, including service at Passchendaele, ‘an epic of mud’. ‘I, figuratively, have never smiled again,’ he said, finding himself deeply affected by the conviction that he (and, as he thought, most soldiers) had brought home: that a warlike state of emergency was in fact ...”

“... capacity of microchips (Moore’s law was named after him as a result); and the visionary genius Robert Noyce was the man who, along with Jack Kilby, invented the microchip.The Texas Instrument chip, Kilby’s invention, looked like a mesa, the stacked layer of rocks familiar to fans of Westerns from shots of the American desert. The layers of wiring were ...”

“... a whole future of DIY bedroom pop made with cheap electronics. This is radicalism in the service of prettiness, lightness, economy. Even the sleeve, by Tom Phillips, is all clean lines and crisp modernism: nature rendered invitingly semi-abstract, reflecting the music within. In the green-washed photo on the back, Eno has notably short hair and is ...”

“... principled radical whose seemingly protean changes of direction and allegiance were always in the service of the polity founded by the Glorious Revolution. Defoe boasted of wearing a mourning ring that had been given at the funeral of Christopher Love, a Presbyterian minister beheaded in 1653 for his part in a plot to overthrow Cromwell. Defoe mentions Love ...”

“... We did debate at some length the relationship between the police and the Crown Prosecution Service in England and Wales, and I am aware that some of our critics would have liked us to recommend that the CPS should directly oversee the way in which the police conduct their investigation and prepare their case. But we concluded that to achieve a ...”

“... literary works to his own poetry and prose, from plays by Aeschylus and Shakespeare’ to works by Robert Louis Stevenson and Machado de Assis. Since 70 per cent of the Portuguese population was illiterate, this was always going to be a struggle. Pessoa paid little attention to costs and ‘his creditors were pounding on the door, almost from the day the Ibis ...”

“... Offa as ‘overlord of the M5’ in Mercian Hymns as referring to a branch of the British secret service rather than the motorway system. Such contingent stuff enters his poetry with a mordant mischief, as though advertising its transience, a spirit that has always been there in Hill though not always appreciated: Hill himself spoke of ‘the constant ...”

“... of sad middle-aged men are encouraged to blame their failure in life on these ancient wanks, a service for which the state will now reward them far more munificently than King ever did. 16 February: Man on the phone opposite takes a piss by the wall, talking throughout. I wonder whether he tells the person he is talking to that he’s currently having a ...”

“... them believe this. Profumo’s other role was to prepare the British army for the end of National Service. Conscription had been in place since 1939, and after the war it had been formalised as a continuing peacetime commitment. The Conservative government wanted to create a professional army, better suited to the specialist demands of the postwar ...”

“... parts of Manhattan.’ Today it’s only a long journey from Brooklyn to Manhattan when the subway service is dragging. The tribal differences between the boroughs have dissolved. To be a Brooklyn native in the new millennium is to belong to the bearded heart of bourgeois hipsterville surrounded by local landmarks from Lena Dunham’s Girls, enlightened by ...”