“... dared to print the name of the head of MI6, Christopher Curwen. The heads of the CIA and the KGB, William Casey and Victor Chebrikov, are of course public figures. But that, as Mr Ingham would say, is not the point. What the point is remains obscure. In 1932 the novelist Compton Mackenzie was tried for a number of breaches of the Official Secrets Act which ...”

“... bystander. Sometimes words simply fail, or at best achieve a lapidary eloquence. Here’s William Tildesley, a 17th-century diarist: ‘June 15, In great payne; June 16, In paines alover; June 17, In great payne.’ And such mute ness may help to explain why many codes of conduct – Stoicism is the obvious example – have prescribed dignified ...”

“... intimately, more agonistically engaged with poetry than anybody else except possibly the youthful William Empson, whom at this time he greatly admired. And the whole business of criticism acquired a new and exhilarating quality. That gnarled manner of speaking or writing sounded serious, deliberate and urgent, a new way of stressing the high importance of the ...”

“... out how the popes piped fresh water to their city and sewage away from it.* Lawrence Principe and William Newman (Alchemy Tried in the Fire, 2002) and Pamela Smith (The Making and Knowing Project) have decrypted arcane manuscripts and recreated forgotten crafts to establish how alchemists and artisans actually did their work, which they then ...”

“... a private prosecution against the magazine on a charge of blasphemous libel because of a poem by James Kirkup it had published which described Jesus having sex with a variety of men, including Pontius Pilate. John Mortimer and Geoffrey Robertson appeared for the defence, but lost. Gay News was fined and its publisher given a suspended prison sentence. ‘I ...”

“... West End, with its salubrious air and proximity to the Houses of Parliament and the Court of St James’s, was more attractive than ever. Its rise was unstoppable, its nature always mutable. There was no crisis from which it did not emerge invigorated. John Nash designed Piccadilly Circus as a rond-point for his great picturesque town plan leading up Regent ...”

“... Ben Elliot. Starmer’s former chief of staff, Sam White, went to Flint Global, where his boss is James Purnell, who served as a minister under Gordon Brown. Flint claims to offer its clients – which include Meta, Amazon and Uber – ‘unparalleled insight into how Labour thinks and works’. The former home secretary Jacqui Smith was a specialist partner ...”

“... dolphins and absence of carbon monoxide. Artists have come for 150 years: the pre-Raphaelite William Toplis; Mervyn Peake and the Sark Art Group; the New Zealander Rhona Haszard. In 1815, an admirer lamented that Rousseau had died before discovering his ideal island. Swinburne wanted to be its king and drink ‘rapture of rest’. Temperatures avoid ...”

“... Keynes in the 1980s, now talks cheerfully about the union hiring a lobbyist who used to work for William Hague, Philip Snape, to press its anti-privatisation case with the coalition. Context has changed too. Even as the old empire of Britain’s postal bureaucrats began to crumble with the split-off of British Telecom under Margaret Thatcher in 1981, a ...”

“... was to keep the boilers fired and steam up. Films ranging from the wartime In Which We Serve to James Cameron’s Titanic have portrayed the scramble for the ladder and the closing watertight door when the ship tilts and the sea pours in – the perfect ingredients for the audience’s later claustrophobic nightmares. But how did men live with this fearful ...”

“... a year or so later, is also board- (and perhaps bored-) stiff. Five years on, in 1760, he painted William Brooke, four times Mayor of Doncaster: a mercer dressed in good brown velvet with a great belly swelling above spread knees, and arms akimbo. This pose of the fat man of authority (it is similar to the one Ingres put M. Bertin the banker in) would be used ...”

“... problem, in the Section’s eyes, was unemployment. The younger economists in the Section, notably James Meade, developed the approach outlined by Keynes in the General Theory published in 1936. Robbins himself had initially rejected Keynes in favour of the ‘classical’ position, but was in process of being converted and was content to leave the younger ...”

“... the general consensus in the early days was that television and politics didn’t mix. Thus Sir William Haley, Director-General of the BBC in the late Forties, believed that television was totally unsuited to political discussion. The ‘Fourteen Day Rule’, under which no subject likely to be debated in the Commons within the next fortnight could be ...”

“... after 1776 compelled London officials to find other locations where convicts could be dumped. As James Matra explained in 1783, the British turned to Botany Bay to ‘atone for the loss of our American colonies’. Ekirch opens his fascinating account with the 1718 passage of the Transportation Act. The Members of Parliament, like many substantial citizens ...”

“... Attorney’s office, and the fortuitous presence of the Canadian intelligence co-ordinator Sir William Stephenson, Gouzenko might have shared the wretched fate of his ambassador, bundled onto a Soviet freighter in New York for home, and the mercies of the KGB. The pattern didn’t change until the Sixties, when we began to breed our own moles. Mr ...”