“... with the Secretary of State for the Colonies, Lord Glenelg, and the Colonial Under-Secretary James Stephen (Virginia Woolf’s grandfather), with his Clapham Sect faith in the brotherhood of man. In the words of the historian Manning Clark, Stephen had come to the conclusion that ‘convicts and their descendants were corrupting, degrading and tormenting ...”

“... James Thurber’s best-known cartoon has an impassive little man introducing his spouse to a dazed friend with ‘That’s My First Wife Up There, and This Is the Present Mrs Harris.’ The first Mrs Harris seems to be crouched on all fours on the top of a very high (glazed) bookcase, just behind the second Mrs Harris ...”

“... England? Highly peripatetic, educated in Dublin and London, a student of medicine in Germany and Holland and a friend of Comenius, he was a veteran of military campaigns in France and of merchandising ventures in the Levant and all over the Mediterranean; but Thompson points to his ‘many reactionary traits’: his adherence to hierarchy, a reference in his ...”

“... of self-fashioning, he is an essentially Jacobean product. Sometime after the accession of King James in 1603, he gained entry to the court of the precocious young Prince of Wales. According to Bishop Fuller, ‘Prince Henry allowed him a pension and kept him for his servant. Sweetmeats and Coryate made up the last course on all court entertainments.’ In ...”

“... at another checkpoint a few days later) and supporters from the United States, Britain, France, Holland and Belgium. Opposite them stood Israeli jeeps, an armoured personnel carrier and a unit of combat troops. One soldier poking out of the personnel carrier’s roof had his tripod-mounted automatic rifle pointed at the crowd. None of the demonstrators ...”

“... story of the atomic bomb began in 1932 at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, with James Chadwick’s discovery of the neutron, a particle the size of the nucleus of the lightest atom, hydrogen, but without its positive charge, thus making it electrically neutral. Chadwick’s discovery led Enrico Fermi in Rome to irradiate many different ...”

“... Lorna Finlayson, Daniel Finn, Katrina Forrester, Jeremy Harding, Daisy Hildyard, Colin Kidd, James Meek, Ferdinand Mount, Jan-Werner Müller, Jonathan Parry, David RuncimanNeal Ascherson‘On​ 17 June poor France fell. That day, as we trudged past Greenwich … a tug skipper yelled gaily across the water: “Now we know where we are! No more bloody ...”

“... to manipulate, where there are no strong traditions of worker unions,’ Wachowski told me from Holland on Skype. ‘We had no previous experience. We got no help from the union. We were like a leaf in the wind.’An anonymous spokesman for Mondelez in Poland said, by email: ‘In general we have a constructive relationship with our labour ...”

“... became a guide and friend to many enlightened, doubtful readers. It was because of the Elegy that James Boswell would, at difficult times, enjoin himself in his journal to ‘Be Gray.’ In literary history Gray is more often an object of curiosity than of admiration. He is known for having not just one of his poems but his poetic language held up to the ...”

“... same story in different settings. On hearing the word ‘commitment’, she sought refuge in Henry James (an odd hero for a writer whose sentences are so unencumbered and who was also besotted by Elmore Leonard), but she was happy to be accused of consistency: she believed in the salutary power of memory, and the value of precedent. Consistency, after all, was ...”

“... gave him a model for ‘reckless narrative disclosure’ of a sort very far removed from Henry James. He doesn’t go into detail in The Facts, but Roth Unbound provides some disconcerting background information about the talking cure as it worked in this particular case. His analyst was Hans Kleinschmidt, an émigré German Jew who fled the ...”

“... congregation look sober and worthy, Gay Pride not much in evidence with the wreath laid by Thelma Holland, Wilde’s daughter-in-law, a link which vaults the century. After the congregation clears we do cutaway shots of the window, ‘the little patch of blue’, and that’s the end of our filming in the Abbey which has been going on, on and off, since last ...”

“... the creation of the CIA. Without Fleming, Cockburn wrote on the fiftieth anniversary of the first James Bond novel, ‘the Cold War would have ended in the early 1960s. We would have had no Vietnam, no Nixon, no Reagan and no Star Wars.’ As adjutant to Britain’s chief of naval intelligence, Lieutenant Commander Fleming undertook a secret mission to ...”

“... Brotherhood of Ventriloquists, recruiting hundreds of disciples from Cuba, Guatemala, Holland, Ireland and India as well as Britain, Canada and the US. Their international organ was known as the Oracle, and several of them solemnised their vocation by calling themselves ‘doctor’ or ‘professor’. When Berger died, his Kentucky home became a ...”

“... the Great War, he serves in the intelligence corps; in civilian life he owns a large house in Holland Park and an Old Rectory in Berkshire. The 18th-century canvases on his own walls are valuable canine portraits by George Stubbs. Clifford Smith dates the new acquisition to around 1735 and explains to the world that it is clearly a mockery of ‘poor ...”