“... countryside, ambled through the gates of the Caravanserai’). But for Stalin, Tiflis meant a stern seminary education and, running parallel to this, his induction, first into the world of literature forbidden by the seminary, from Zola and Victor Hugo to Tolstoy and Saltykov-Shchedrin, and then into the world of revolution. While Stalin was still a ...”

“... Slow), he is the encouraging old pro, spreading the largesse. He recognised and recommended Richard Yates (Revolutionary Road), ‘an all-around swell cat’. The literary shoptalk in these letters is free of jargon and brimming with embattled fellow-feeling. Commiseration and comradeship are the dominant chords, although the competitive drive to be the ...”

“... of International Politics which he could legitimately have expected. The Master of Balliol, the stern Calvinist Lindsay Keir, disliked everything about Carr – his affairs, his politics, his past, his present, even his dress (he used to pad about the college in sand-shoes). Carr was the obvious candidate for the Chair, when it fell vacant, but a palace ...”

“... atheist denying a dying or dead Catholic the consolations of religion. Coming away I see Richard Ingrams, swathed in a black anorak, trudging along the pavement. He has a brief word with Fr Cunningham, much as, one feels, Oxford dons used to have with the train driver at Paddington when he’d brought the Cathedrals Express in on time. 15 April. In ...”

“... as ever.Gavin Stamp was not of the flock. He was a propagandist, a preservationist, a stern critic and fierce journalist. He was a great historian – evident in his Memorial to the Missing of the Somme (2006) – as well as a great architectural historian. No one else could have written Interwar. Unlike most historians, he has few scores to ...”

“... after less than a year – two mothers lost before she was three. The family was Scotch-Irish, stern, devout and patriotic. Her father, Reverend Warner, was pastor to the Presbyterian church in Gettysburg; he watched the battle from a trapdoor in his roof and when it ended delivered his eyewitness account not only in churches and lecture halls up and down ...”

“... from constituencies with a wide franchise), the machinations of the government were widely known. Richard Carlile, the editor of the Republican, concluded that ‘the ministers have been playing with Thistlewood … they brought the Cato-street affair to maturity, just to answer their purposes for striking terror into the minds of the people on the eve of a ...”

“... Vinal, already the mother of one illegitimate child, swore that the father of her next was one Richard Parkes, ‘husbandman of the parish of Ringmer’. On 25 October Turner set off at 2 a.m. for Ringmer, accompanied by two colleagues from East Hoathly, one of whom, a prosperous farmer called Jeremiah French, was known to Turner as a scourge of paupers ...”

“... in the hope of correcting, the spiritual failings of weaker brethren. Yet Herbert was more stern, perhaps more Puritanical even, than the possibly more typical clergyman who thought it part of his job ‘to spend his groat at the alehouse’. The silent evidence leaves us to wonder, not merely what proportion of the parish clergy were sociable, but how ...”

“... Revenge just at hand. Drake had been ordered to keep in the Armada’s wake all night, his stern lantern showing the English fleet the way. The light had vanished at some point, the fleet had scattered; and now, on Monday, 1 August, the Armada was beyond Dartmouth, well ahead. But Drake took the Rosario, transferred the royal money-chest and its 50,000 ...”

“... Nor does she discuss The historical tragedy of Mary, Queen of Scots. By the author of Hamlet, Richard III, Othello, As You like It, etc. Deciphered from the works of Sir Francis Bacon by Orville Ward Owen (1894), though its determination not just to promote the National Poet to courtier status but to credit Shakespeare (or at least ‘Shakespeare’) with ...”

“... of whom came from socially prominent families, assisted her.’ Her antics were widely discussed. Richard Avedon remembered her organising a photograph of a model in ‘a stiff wedding dress’. Having shouted for pins, Vreeland took one, ‘and walked swinging her hips down the narrow office to the end. She stuck the pin not only into the dress but into the ...”

“... the Swedish former Red Cross official Count Folke Bernadotte, when it was ambushed by the Stern Gang. Bernadotte and the man who had taken Bunche’s seat were shot at point-blank range. ‘I know we killed the wrong man,’ the assassin, Yehoshua Cohen, said years later. ‘The black man was the right man. He was the man with the ideas.’At Lie’s ...”

“... Palgrave in Suffolk. She was a celebrity – Wedgwood produced a cameo of her, and she appeared in Richard Samuel’s painting The Nine Living Muses of Great Britain at the Royal Academy in 1779 – but involved herself in the obscure business of schooling with characteristic energy and intelligence: she liked the boys and did not sentimentalise them, and she ...”

“... was quite fairylike,’ a survivor told the New York Times. The ship, ‘illuminated from stem to stern, was perfectly stationary like some fantastic piece of stage scenery … For three hours cries of anguish were heard like some vast choir singing a death song.’ Joseph Conrad wrote with a ‘certain bitterness’ shortly after the night of 14-15 April ...”