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“... on Soviet clients like Egypt and Syria. It occasionally helped protect other US allies (like King Hussein of Jordan) and its military prowess forced Moscow to spend more on backing its own client states. It also provided useful intelligence about Soviet capabilities. Backing Israel was not cheap, however, and it complicated America’s relations with the ...”

“... age. A few years later, she also agreed to have a biography written by the historian Michael King, who took the approach of telling a ‘compassionate truth’, defined as ‘a presentation of evidence and conclusions that fulfil the major objectives of biography, but without the revelation of information that would involve the living subject in ...”

“... his opponent was saying exhibited the profound conviction of his own beliefs. Did not the poet King David say: ‘Let them be ashamed and confounded that seek after my soul: let them be turned backward and put to confusion, that desire my hurt’? Individualism, bordering on eccentricity, even to the extent of ‘cutting off your nose to spite your ...”

“... and where by the early 1920s both the poet laureate Robert Bridges and the future poet laureate John Masefield had established themselves in suburban comfort. Graves lived from 1919 to 1921 in Dingle Cottage at the bottom of Masefield’s garden. I walk my dog past the cottage quite often. It’s set down in a marshy hollow which has a faint air of primal ...”

“... monarchism is in tension with some proto-republican elements. Paulin’s next major monarchist, John Dryden, seems a less ambiguous figure: ‘Absalom and Achitophel’, which Paulin much admires and prints in full, presents the political debate stirred up by the Whigs as a feverish disease of which the body politic needs to be cured. This nostalgia for an ...”

“... his eyes lasered. If you’ve watched D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus’s 1981 documentary about John DeLorean, another car man with a magic touch, you may recognise this as the moment where the hitherto unprepossessing DeLorean sheds his corporate image, making himself over as an American playboy with model girlfriends and a sexily enhanced new ...”

“... Magna Carta that he hoped to export to Sierra Leone. The other English hero of Rough Crossings is John Clarkson, brother of Thomas, a navy officer who had spent his early career in the Caribbean without displaying any qualms about slavery. On returning to Britain in 1783, however, he was swept up in his brother’s campaigns. At the suggestion of ...”

“... guinea pigs. In 1822, the illiterate young French-Canadian was working as a ‘voyageur’ for John Jacob Astor’s fur-trading company in northern Michigan. He was hanging out with a bunch of rowdies in the company store when a shotgun accidentally went off and he was hit below his left nipple. The injury was serious and likely to be fatal – his ...”

“... than Americans think they do and a great deal less than British people think Australians do. In John O’Grady’s poem ‘Integrated Adjective’, an Australian in a bar is overheard saying he’s been ‘Up at Tumba-bloody-rumba shootin’ kanga-bloody-roos’. The poet describes the integration of the group around the use of the inte-bloody-grated ...”

“... of a ‘new world-epoch’, but the death of an old one: Natty is in his seventies, and Indian John, as Chingachgook is called by the residents of Templeton, a frontier settlement based on the Cooperstown of the novelist’s childhood, is a sad shadow of the Mohican warrior he once was, especially in the Christmas tavern scene in which he partakes a little ...”

“... about the Stone was precisely its absence: the fact that it had been carted off by an English king in an act of plunder which was also intended to be a symbolic act of conquest. Not the Stone, but the presence of the Stone at Westminster served to define one of the underlying realities of the English-Scottish relationship, and it continued to do so even ...”

“... think. He even tried to persuade his pet astrologer to discover favourable auguries for the match. John Fowles, typically, fantasised about seducing her and imprisoning her underground, not necessarily in that order. Pablo Picasso claimed that only the princess would be a suitable bride to be the châtelaine of his vast new villa, La Californie. At ...”

“... the White House said, to lobbying by the powerful and unlikely duo of Henry Kissinger and Elton John. Nonetheless Amiel remains furious at the way she and Black have been treated and is intent on establishing his innocence on all counts. Her memoir is a bookend to his, A Matter of Principle, published in 2011, in which he praises her ‘constancy, resolve ...”

“... such an event.A less well-known but more interesting scam than any of these was pulled off by Dr John Ackah Blay-Miezah, who persuaded investors across Ghana and the US that he was the sole beneficiary of a $27 billion trust fund hidden away in Swiss bank accounts by Kwame Nkrumah. He explained that as the former Ghanaian president’s closest confidant, he ...”

“... of this debate was ‘Options for Change’, which was announced by the Secretary of Defence, Tom King, last July. He envisaged a 20 per cent cut in military manpower, including a halving of the British Army of the Rhine. The precise details of how these cuts were to be implemented were to be worked out later. Eight days after ‘Options for Change’ was ...”