“... keen on golf, tall, a considerable joker, with a thick brogue and blue eyes behind round steel-rimmed spectacles – a Scarlet Pimpernel maybe … O’Flaherty lived in – of all places – the German College, between the old palace of the Inquisition and the Vatican. It was from here … that he plotted and planned, arranging disguises and false ...”

“... Union at Cardiff (where his wife Glenys was a full-time NUS official) Kinnock, like David Steel, whose beginnings in the Student Representative Council at Edinburgh were very similar, is a standard-bearer of the Sixties generation of student politicians. But NUS politics, different entirely from the debating-society politics of the Oxbridge Unions, is ...”

“... man who gives me directions to Peckham Library. It is about three o’clock in the afternoon, on a steel-grey day two weeks after the death of Damilola Taylor. The centre of Peckham is thronged with police officers, all wearing high-visibility luminous yellow vests, and with equipment strapped around their waists on webbing belts, inflating the clothing around ...”

“... one, where he met Edward Bawden. The two shared a love of neglected landscape watercolourists – John Sell Cotman, Alexander Cozens, Francis Towne and Samuel Palmer; they made a pilgrimage to Palmer’s Shoreham in 1926. Paul Nash, who taught them at the RCA, described their cohort as ‘an outbreak of talent’ and helped Ravilious and Bawden to find work ...”

“... and sculpture undermined art’s humanity. ‘Painting is made out of a love for the subject,’ John Minton repeatedly told his students at the Royal College of Art, in defiance of an abstract tradition that had resurfaced with Victor Pasmore’s 1948 abstracts. Pasmore became a leading member of the Constructionists: abstract artists who abandoned nature ...”

“... The nice thing about John Buchan is that he was on the side of books. He thought, it is true, that he ought to have been a Guardian, shaping the Empire, or dominating Cabinets, or, at worst, ‘a power behind the throne’. However, after his spell in Milner’s ‘Kindergarten’, the nation didn’t seem to want him in the Guardian line, so he did the next best thing and became an entertainer ...”

“... it had been in the days when O’Hara and the gang could go downtown to the Blue Note and hear John Coltrane or uptown to hear Billie Holiday. This kind of nostalgia can be tiresome: better for each generation to invent a new idea of the new – to enlarge the temple. In his poems, Hofmann has found a way to do this. In each, no matter how short, one feels ...”

“... he hadn’t counted on how little one congressman (out of 435) could do. The speaker of the House, John Boehner, set the agenda, and Meadows was expected to do what he was told. ‘Boehner had “enforcers”, not unlike a Mafia don. If you didn’t vote how he wanted, these enforcers – most notably his leadership team – would ban you from congressional ...”

“... platform. The Chinese NCOs wiped their boots as the blood ran into the metal grooves of the steel rails. A tram crowded with passengers approached, its bell forcing the execution party aside. It clanked along, connector rod hissing and throwing sparks from the overhead power line, its front wheels a moist scarlet as if painted for the annual labour ...”

“... that the scientific hero embarks upon whatever research enterprise he believes to be worthy of his steel, regardless of the risks of defeat. These are some of the faces that Albert Einstein presents to us now. But for his contemporaries he must also have played a more immediate role – the fellow-citizen of the republic of learning. Consider the third of ...”

“... Soviet troops crossed the boundaries of pre-1939 Germany, and the atrocities they committed helped steel the resolve of the defenders. When the Germans retook the East Prussian village of Nemmersdorf they found dozens of bodies of women and children who had been murdered in the most gruesome ways. In the months that followed, Soviet forces killed or violated ...”

“... long periods of insomnia when I sat up all night, gazing out at the industrial night above our steel-town estate; an incident when, during a stay in a hotel in Portsmouth, I ‘woke’ to find myself in the bathroom, blood running down my cheek. What was happening? Was my sleep condition a lifelong malaise that had taken different forms over the years, and ...”

“... was only carried by a handful of votes. In view of the virtually unanimous support for the Owen-Steel initiative at the SDP’s Harrogate Conference, the apparent split between the two parties hides an almost 3-to-l majority for their European initiative and against a non-nuclear policy. Arguments about defence in 1986 have not been the sole property of the ...”

“... as a setting for sculpture are the consequences of a single-minded pursuit by its main architect, John Russell Pope, of its underlying purpose, which was to provide a famous dealer in need of respectability, Lord Duveen, with a chance to display his munificence on a colossal scale. So the space seems designed to diminish any person or thing that enters ...”

“... he be required to remove his trousers. Lowe, it turns out, was a sergeant-major in the war, and John Le Mesurier, who played the limp Sergeant Wilson, was a captain. Now Lowe was playing a bank manager who had come up the hard way, and Le Mesurier, his chief clerk, was a pampered ex-public schoolboy, incapable of giving orders (‘Oh, Wilson! Bark it ...”