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“... the hero to turn the tables on the agency and to expose one of its larger malignant operations. Michael Hayden, who became the director of the NSA in 1999, saw the movie and told his workers they had an image problem: the agency had to change its ways and inspire the trust of citizens. But in 2001 Hayden, like many other Americans, underwent a galvanic ...”

“... comes to the crunch (you know the type) – is assigned to the case. With the help of a beautiful young New York Times journalist, March uncovers a vast conspiracy, reaching all the way to the highest echelons of power: the Gestapo, it seems, is quietly disposing of everyone who attended a secret Nazi conference that took place at Wannsee on 20 January ...”

“... a rate in Liverpool and Lambeth; by Ken Livingstone’s courting of Sinn Fein during his time as a young political activist in London; by Margaret Hodge’s defiance of rate-capping in Islington (her purpose, she said, was ‘to support all our comrades who are in the frontline’ and ‘inflict massive damage on the Government’). As the New Labour pollster ...”

“... to keep a tight rein on her three daughters. Adaline’s moral code was worked out in what Michael Holroyd in his introduction memorably terms the ‘moral gymnasium’ of the last Victorian decades. He characterises it, too harshly, as a culture of ‘conceit and condemnation … complacency and fear of change’, but it was a period when conventions ...”

“... bodyguard of the Emperor Nero, and martyred after he was converted to Christianity by St Paul). St Michael is the best-known archangel, and in his role as destroyer of devils is often portrayed in a terrific suit of armour. He is the patron saint of soldiers and police; his shrine on Monte Gargano in southern Italy remembers his support for the Normans as they ...”

“... little darling reads these sorts of books at his age, what will he do when he grows up?” ’ The young Jean-Paul retorts precociously, ‘Je les vivrai’ – a reply which proved a lasting success. Even more long-lasting than his family imagined: first Sartre lived the threateningly anti-bourgeois life described in the dangerous classics; now, for long ...”

“... Maxwell discusses the implications of his embryonic electrodynamic theory. He writes excitedly to Michael Faraday about his discovery that, according to his own theory, electric and magnetic fields would propagate with a speed that appeared to be identical with the speed of light – from which he concludes, as he states in a subsequent letter to ...”

“... I was put at the bottom of the list when all the great figures such as Bertrand Russell and Michael Foot had gone home: However, for some reason I put the audience in a frenzy. After I had finished and gone home, the audience swarmed out and laid siege to No 10 Downing Street. It was a very satisfactory start to the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. For ...”

“... fights unceasing and growing civil disorder. Active involvement in Ireland ceased in 1921 (to the young Monty’s relief: ‘such a war is thoroughly bad for officers and men; it tends to lower their standards of decency and chivalry ...’), but Palestine, ‘the one potentially explosive area which defied all political and military attempts to muddle ...”

“... and Paul Muldoon professes to like ‘a great number of poems by a great number of people from Michael Drayton to Craig Raine’. These may seem curious choices as termini of the English tradition, but at the modern end he seems to allude to what has become something of a critical orthodoxy on Raine – that he is the newest and best thing going, modern ...”

“... Disraeli, a miscellany of works which I also passed by, Disraeli not being my favourite man – Michael Foot can have him; Asquith, 600 pages of love-letters to a girl not half his age; Churchill, first of two volumes of biography by an American writer, a disquisition on his political philosophy, and a massive collection of documents relating to his career ...”

“... beef farm in Yorkshire come inside for the winter, and we had recently separated a group of young bullocks from the rest of the herd. The bullocks went into a barn and the others were supposed to stay out for a few more days, but they didn’t like it, and expressed their dislike loudly. We had to move the bullocks’ mothers to a distant field far from ...”

“... through the engravings of these and other printmakers that European landscapes were known to young British artists. Turner and Constable would have known even the landscapes of their great predecessor Richard Wilson mainly through some wonderful prints by Woollett and others, and at the Academy no fewer than 12 of these are exhibited together, classical ...”

“... who says it’s OK to carry on with the experiment. Neil Armstrong, the first man on the Moon, and Michael Collins, who circled the Moon while the first two men walked on it, years later admitted to each other that they privately put the mission’s chance of success (read: survival) at 50-50. That level of risk is no longer acceptable for anything carried on ...”

“... book begins: ‘On a clear, blueblack, starry night, in the city of Berlin, in the year 2003, two young people sat down to dinner. Their names were Sophie and Patrick.’ These two, it turns out, are merely the offspring of two of the novel’s main characters, whose stories Sophie proceeds to tell: ‘Come with me, then, Patrick. Let’s go ...”