“... cannot imagine how the world of singers went on in the days when “Tara’s Halls”, and “The young May Moon”, and “The Meeting of the Waters”, were strains unborn.’ One of the clearest signs of how rapidly and how widely the song became popular is the inclusion of the Avoca Meeting on the tourist trail. The song and the place became popular ...”

“... usually have a down on horse-play, having been swots when at school and being exposed to the rough young afterwards. I feel with my colleagues there entirely. I would greatly dislike having to engage in horse-play, let alone be horse-played upon. But it is no use talking as if only low-class criminals behaved like this: within living memory, the chief danger ...”

“... or his reviewers in the Arab world thought. For most admirers, the scuffed surfaces and – as Edward Said wrote later – the ‘formlessness’ of the novel were authentic reflections of the civil war. And so this landmark on the road of ‘post-Mahfouzian’ fiction, welcome in literary circles where Mahfouz’s stature seemed vaguely unsettling, was ...”

“... fund of the World Bank, run by Hilda Ochoa-Brillembourg, who liked to make bets on up-and-coming young fund managers with something to prove. She ended up letting Bridgewater go, because ‘for all Dalio’s grandiloquence, the trades that Bridgewater had recommended for the World Bank were essentially just bets on whether interest rates would rise or ...”

“... No lie, no British participation in the invasion. Oborne quotes Churchill’s reply in 1940 to a young rating on a battleship who asked him whether everything he told them was true: ‘Young man, I have told many lies for my country, and will tell many more.’ In wartime, and in sterling crises too, Oborne accepts that ...”

“... from France to Germany. Wrongly – wilfully, as it turned out – it had been attributed to the young Jewish artillery captain, the rising star at the headquarters of the General Staff of the French army, Alfred Dreyfus. To put it simply, Dreyfus had been framed. In 1894, he was court-martialled, convicted of treason and then in 1895 deported to Devil’s ...”

“... could be seen from a single, central vantage point. In cell after cell where, most recently, young offenders had been held, there was a set of metal bunk beds riveted to the wall, with a small table and two stools opposite, and a metal sink close to the small window, high in the wall across from the door, and a toilet on the other side of a small ...”

“... her daughter.’ But this preference had to be reciprocated. One day, when my sister was very young, our mother asked her whom she loved best, Mummy or Daddy. My sister did in fact love Mummy best but, being of an angelic disposition, lied diplomatically: ‘I love you both the same.’ Mummy didn’t speak to her for days.Not speaking to people for days ...”

“... 1962, Diouri had joined the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN). He was an associate of another young anti-colonialist, Ahmed Agouliz (nom de guerre Cheikh el Arab). Agouliz had gone into hiding with no intention of abandoning the armed struggle: both he and Diouri were convinced that independence in Morocco was unfinished business. Many other opposition ...”

“... devotion to duty, languages and wide experience’. Donovan ignored him. His operatives were young and anything but discreet, sober or, for the most part, fluent in languages other than English. Many came from America’s upper echelons: Mellon, Vanderbilt, du Pont, Morgan and other robber baron families. Some, to the dismay of J. Edgar Hoover at the ...”

“... he truly likes. Love, for a good writer, enforces precision, the kind of exactitude before which a young Hughes stood in awe when contemplating the work of Jan van Eyck (The Complete Paintings of the Van Eycks, 1968). Hughes greatly admires, for example, Lucian Freud, who stands prominently on his post-war shortlist of two dozen or so artists. One could ...”

“... content. He was not the only actor of his age to have developed a ‘great melody’ – Edward Gibbon was another – but he has to be known in this way, and Dr O’Brien has set out to depict the ‘great melody’ as formed by what he was and by the grand issues – the themes to which the subtitle alludes – to which he gave himself. This is not ...”

“... of Ernest Samuels’s painstakingly researched and beautifully written biography of the young Berenson, subtitled The Making of a Connoisseur. By no means a hagiography, Samuels’s book offered a view of Berenson in the full flower of his blooming egotism, as well as a penetrating insight into his Paterian idealism, and his adaptation of the ...”

“... Eventually a third school of interpretation emerged. Its founder was a CI analyst named Clare Edward Petty, now dead (like almost everyone in this story). Petty concluded that Angleton was himself a Russian penetration agent, deliberately tying up the CIA in knots with his suspicions and doubts and backdoor campaign to block efforts to collect the ...”

“... sort, he soaked himself in opera, and grew confident, though possibly no more than many other young men, of some sort of future greatness. At 20, having moved with the family to London, he was ghosting music criticism for Lee and writing stories, book reviews and part of a play about Jesus. The ‘pale, private Shaw’ he then was decided to be a ...”