“... in World War Two, the ‘turning’ of German agents. That was when MI5 took in all those bright young dons, like my recruiter in the 1960s, to help the ex-colonial introverts out. Thereafter, MI5’s achievement was patchy: catching some spies, but missing a lot, including the Cambridge Five, and smearing several innocents. It was also hugely damaged in the ...”

“... of the 20th century there were several related attempts, by writers such as Richard Jefferies and Edward Thomas, to identify ‘England’ with ‘the countryside’ (largely for an urban readership), while the interwar decades tended to throw up more quizzical searches for ‘the real England’, assumed to have been submerged by the shoddy detritus of ...”

“... myself I’m Gay Talese again.’ ‘The ones who come and go’, in James’s telling, include a young woman called Nina Burgess, who’s had a one night stand with Marley; Barry Diflorio, a CIA man; and Alex. The rest are gangsters, and the bigger picture they open up is a view from the ground of the working relationship between organised crime and Jamaican ...”

“... and it reproduced the famous propaganda poster, Ulster 1914, with the province personified as a young woman with long, flowing hair, defiantly carrying a rifle against a Union Jack, and proclaiming: ‘Deserted! Well – I Can Stand Alone.’ Part of Godson’s theme is Unionist or Protestant solitariness, their distrust of the English, and commitment to ...”

“... entirely fitting for a piece written within the context of marital negotiations, especially by a young and attention-seeking poet. Dunbar is the first writer in Scots who can legitimately be called a ‘Court poet’. The Scottish kings had no great tradition of encouraging literary patronage, and indeed for much of Dunbar’s career at James IV’s Court ...”

“... pushed a younger child into a vessel of hot water with fatal results. During the reign of Edward I, a pardon was extended to a child under seven, even though, by then, it was laid down that a child under seven could not be convicted of felony. Much later, in 1748, William York, aged ten, murdered a child of five and buried her in a dunghill. ‘When ...”

“... politicians dominated New Labour cabinets in Westminster but failed to cultivate voters or young politicians at home, and didn’t see the potential for the new devolved parliament to become the SNP’s power base.It’s now almost impossible for Labour to win under the first-past-the-post system that Blair chose to preserve, ignoring the ...”

“... in the 1960s was merely the prototype for the full-scale invasion of privacy that, as revealed by Edward Snowden, has since become standard government procedure; Abu Ghraib was merely the tip of the iceberg of ‘enhanced interrogation procedures’ still secretly in use in the endless war on terror. At our current moment, amid pervasive public ignorance ...”

“... when you write,’ his uncle the sculptor Hamo Thornycroft advised him. Sassoon himself wrote to Edward Carpenter (one of his many gurus on a variety of subjects, in this case how to live a free life as a homosexual): ‘I’m one of those people who can only learn things by coming into the closest possible contact with them.’ He was well aware that he ...”

“... tracking one down to the Colorado desert, where he was approached by a member of the crew, a young man of ‘Nordic’ appearance, wearing what appeared to be ski pants. He had soft, unblemished skin, long, flowing hair and sparkling white teeth. Communicating telepathically, he explained that his name was Orthon, that he came from Venus, and that he was ...”

“... solicitor and his mother a teacher of Latin and Greek. It was a household that valued learning and Edward and Mildred Ede were not so straitlaced as Jim was wont to suggest. They were, however, children of the 1860s. Jim liked to tell the story of the silver paper knife his father brought home on one occasion with a handle in the shape of a naked woman, and ...”

“... slavery-free, Colony of Georgia: the trustees’ secretary, Benjamin Martyn, not only helped James Edward Oglethorpe draw up Savannah’s utopian town plan but served on the fundraising committee for the Westminster Abbey statue of Shakespeare, even contributing a prologue for the benefit performance of Julius Caesar that the countess organised in 1738. When ...”

“... it is not) an official biography, he has evidently depended on or even worked fairly closely with Edward Mendelson, perhaps Auden’s ‘scholar-in-chief’, his literary executor and the editor who worked directly according to his wishes. And yet legends afflict Mendelson’s work as well. After his edition of the Collected Poems, which retains Auden’s own ...”

“... searches on jihad, weapons and combat training. Sometimes those arrested were simply unattached young Muslim men who had displayed no suspicious behaviour at all. Unable to find real threats, law enforcement was forced to imagine them and to engage in what Beck calls ‘pre-emptive prosecution’ – convictions wholly or partly concocted by law ...”

“... mug: good bones, a nicely shaped head, straight nose, brown eyes, full mouth. A bit like the young Marlon Brando, in fact, especially around the eyes. In this good fortune, he took after the men on my mother’s side of the family. Me, I got stuck with the other. In retrospect, for someone that good-looking and wild, he didn’t have a lot of girlfriends ...”