“... 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 ...”

“... of TfL, and Johnson has declared – in a deliberate lie – that Khan has ‘bankrupted’ the service. In fact, the major cause of TfL’s woes is its reliance on passenger fares for 72 per cent of its funding, after a deal between George Osborne and Johnson, towards the end of his stint as mayor, slashed its central funding by £700 million. The ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... feeling were threatened by crazy prophets who were acquiring disastrously wide influence – by Robert Knox, the anatomist who published in 1850 a book. The Races of Man, which identified black people as natural slaves, and by Thomas Carlyle, whose ravings about ‘the Nigger Question’ came out around the same time. The Indian Mutiny of 1857, as presented ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... about Satan.Matthiessen’s father was an architect and a naval reserve officer decorated for his service designing simulators to train gunners to shoot down German planes. Matthiessen missed out on the action: he turned eighteen a few weeks after Berlin fell and was stuck in basic training when Truman dropped the bombs on Japan. He did laundry duty for the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a thick, oily and malodorous fog that made it harder for German gunners to find their targets.As Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon and other memoirists of the First World War made clear, there was always a radical division between ‘the line’ and ‘behind the line’. The line meant mud, blood, rats, inedible rations and the continuous, unbearable thunder ...”