“... the historical figure, is the sort of woman whose reputation is so tarnished that any liberty may be taken with her. As she remarked when she found that the Duchess of Beaufort had read her private letters, it is ‘dishonourable and dishonest: at least it would have been called so if I had done it’. The initial motive for writing the Memoirs was ...”

“... this sort of thing kept happening to Khrushchev. Take the grand picnic for the Writers’ Union in May 1957, one of his many catastrophic meetings with the Moscow intellectuals, at which, after a weird, vodka-fuelled tirade, he rushed at the poet Margarita Aliger and bellowed that she was an ‘ideological saboteur’. She reeled outside and fainted, just as a ...”

“... her drawings in 1934, though she found them too tortured to hang), but she was not their peer. She may have been too angry for Hemingway, but she was too wifely for professional writers. Yet in 1970 Zelda’s life, not the careers of her successful contemporaries, became, potentially, our own. Nancy Milford’s extraordinary biography gripped and chilled young ...”

“... the principle of damage-limitation in the Geneva Conventions. Law 28 for instance: ‘No player may wear projecting nails or iron plates on the heels or soles of his shoes or boots.’ Others are faintly ludicrous. Law 21 is a typical public-school injunction, stamped with recondite authority: ‘Two big-side balls must always be in the Close during a match ...”

“... civil unrest and its leadership includes figures schooled in the dark arts of Kenyan politics. We may never know exactly who orchestrated the killings at Kiambaa or elsewhere in Kenya over the past few weeks, but we do know that they were organised. Driven by what the historian E.S. Atieno Odhiambo calls an ‘ideology of order’, the state’s response to ...”

“... of the term East Jerusalem was one of them. The restrictions aren’t confined to geography. On 20 May 2006, Israel’s most popular television channel, Channel 2, reported ‘another targeted assassination in Gaza, an assassination that might ease the firing of Qassams’ (up to 376 people have died in targeted assassinations, 150 of them civilians who were ...”

“... free lee-gal ad-vice-ah’. Who is the joke on here? Who cares? Sit back and enjoy the ride. It may be that the reason all this works is that Dylan is Dylan, and simply hearing him do something as mundane as spinning a few records and reading out a couple of emails exerts its own magnetic pull. But radio can make the most interesting people sound boring if ...”

“... the Rivonia days. We can all feel proud of Mandela and Sisulu, of Fischer and, yes, of Joffe. He may be Lord Joffe these days but he played his part. What none of us can feel happy about is that Mandela invited Percy Yutar to his presidential inauguration and later went out of his way to visit him and shake his hand. Mandela explained such gestures by the ...”

“... At another point, Campbell notes that ‘he had clearly been chatting to his maker again.’ That may be the key to Blair’s metamorphosis from a politician who prided himself on his sensitivity to public opinion, to one who prided himself on his ability to ignore it. The full extent of the disaster in Iraq is not present in these pages, but it looms over ...”

“... 17 years later, claimed he knew the joint concerned. ‘If you know Hastings really well you may recognise it.’ Hastings or wherever (‘Burra-Burra Land’ Davenport called it), Burra created here one of his finest greed scenes, stiff with innuendo. The place is a composite. The salami slicer with the Swiss roll hairdo could well be Burra himself, or ...”

“... described Albania as an ‘oriental’ country where ‘a certain amount of financial wisdom may have to be instilled by means of a revolver.’ By this time, the gun had mostly yielded to the pen – preferably wielded by a former colonial administrator. Nixon was impressed by one candidate for a job at the League who had ‘experience governing rather ...”

“... by resentment at the French government’s conduct of the war, which lasted from 18 March until 28 May 1871. In an important recent study of the Commune, Quentin Deluermoz argued for its global character, as a manifestation of revolutionary republican tumult stretching from Martinique to Algiers, and a moment of political rupture that shaped the radical left ...”

“... these questions as reductive. ‘Put me on your census now,’ he urges the man, ‘because I may not be here when the next census comes around.’Since the 1960s, when racial statistics became important for monitoring and enforcing civil rights legislation, estimates of differential undercounts (and strenuous follow-ups and statistical ...”

“... on 12 July 1945 stated: ‘His Majesty the Emperor … desires from his heart that [the war] may be quickly terminated, but so long as England and the United States insist upon unconditional surrender, the Japanese Empire has no alternative but to fight on.’ In response, Stimson supported an initiative to let the Japanese know that the emperor would be ...”

“... their fathers or husbands, painting before an audience was a means of demonstrating autonomy. In May 1664, Cosimo, Grand Prince of Tuscany, joined the visitors who packed into Elisabetta Sirani’s studio in Bologna to watch her paint a breastfeeding scene. Having established the first secular art school for girls after inheriting her father’s ...”