“... uprisings against the Russians around the Black Sea coast – two decades earlier, the ambitious young British diplomat David Urquhart had been sacked for making such an attempt in Circassia, just east of the Crimea, which Russia was then trying to subjugate. British and French caution reflected an anxiety that a Balkan ...”

“... about ‘sex depravity’. The scare lasted from 1947 to the 1970s, and in The Lavender Scare David Johnson estimates that thousands lost their jobs. The men and women charged with rinsing the pink from the Potomac were astonishingly ignorant about their quarry. Senator Clyde Hoey, head of the first congressional inquiry into the threat, had to ask an ...”

“... David Solkin​ ’s new book is designed to replace Painting in Britain 1530-1790, a volume of the Pelican history of art by Ellis Waterhouse, which was first published in 1953 and appeared in five separate editions, the last in 1994, nine years after Waterhouse’s death. Waterhouse’s history was quickly recognised as a classic ...”

“... politics on the fringes of the right. Its CEO, Philippa Stroud, a Conservative peer, is married to David Stroud, founder of the charismatic megachurch network Christ Church London. Members of the advisory board include the Republican House Speaker, Mike Johnson; the failed Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who called the 6 January insurrection ...”

“... died of before. Men dying in the time it takes to catch and throw off a cold: ‘One Thursday,’ David France writes in How to Survive a Plague, ‘sexy Tommy McCarthy from the classifieds department stayed out late at an Yma Sumac concert. Friday he had a fever. Sunday he was hospitalised. Wednesday he was dead.’ Later, there were tests. A virus ...”

“... camps of the Soviet state and the death camps of the Nazis: the latter journey, accompanying a young boy, David, and the woman who looks after him on the journey, Sofya Levinton, I found that I could not reread. The horror is all the more real because we have actually witnessed the gas chambers being built, and an ...”

“... Iran Modern (2018), Pahlavi writes that the idea occurred to her in the late 1960s, when a young woman painter complained there was nowhere in Tehran where artworks could be permanently displayed. Pahlavi asked her cousin, the architect Kamran Diba, to come up with a design. He planned the building around a central atrium, which spirals below ground ...”

“... but of him in his ‘real life’. I have a strange photograph of him in that life. It shows three young men dressed in high riding boots and what seems to be Prussian military uniform – white jodhpurs, dark, perhaps blue, gold-braided tunics, a white sash. (The Junker grandees in the von Werner painting of the proclamation of the Second Reich in 1871 were ...”

“... any memory of his existence’ and so changed her son’s name from James Donald Bowman to James David Hamel: ‘Hamel’ was the name of her next husband; she wanted to preserve the ‘J.D.’, but the Donald had to go. He’s only been known as ‘J.D. Vance’ – sometimes with dots, sometimes without – since 2014, when he changed his name to honour ...”

“... the Rhine. The fairgrounds and circuses and amusement arcades of plebeian Ludwigshafen offered the young Bloch delights far removed from the patrician theatres and libraries of Schiller’s Mannheim. In music as in the other arts his ‘questionable’ taste was a vital part of his own questioning of ‘taste’ and the hierarchies it stood for: but it was ...”

“... by now he was a client too. Khrushchev became party leader in Ukraine in 1938, and recruited this young man – obedient, efficient and popular – to help reconstruct Soviet authority in a country traumatised and depopulated by the purges. Under this protection, Brezhnev rose rapidly. He became head of the local trade department, then Ukraine’s chief ...”

“... of the magazine to hire women … and for many years it hired only women.’ An editor wrote the young ladies a cheering memo: Checking is … sometimes regarded as a dull and tedious occupation, but such a conception of this position is extremely erroneous. Any bright girl who really applies herself to the handling of the checking problem can have a very ...”

“... the normal world – but who wants to live there?’ He takes men and women he describes as ‘young, hungry and stupid’ and turns them into a howling, irresistible sales force, persuading investors to buy lousy stock the traders can dump once they have made a packet from the brief, illusory booms. DiCaprio describes the job as ‘selling garbage to ...”

“... back ‘in the Old Country’. ‘I forget which one exactly,’ he says. A memory flash shows a young Grampa on a boat where everyone has an Irish accent mixed with something that might be Polish. But the subtlest and funniest joke in the episode, the one that best sums up all the hypocrisy thriving then and now on the subject of immigration and therefore ...”

“... among its impeccable olde London costumes and sets – as if it were looking for a slot between Young Sherlock Holmes and My Fair Lady – it has an edge which is entirely contemporary in two senses. It belongs to the actual life of the men in question, not their legacy, and it speaks to concerns of the 21st century, where science looks more like magic ...”