“... magazines and saw photos of what our allies’ bombing planes had done to the city of Port Said at the head of the canal, I felt glad that Americans didn’t have to look at pictures like those as our work.’ Ellsberg returned to Harvard to write his doctoral dissertation – on a typically American subject, game theory – and then accepted a ...”

“... or isolated one from the other. They work in combination all the way through. Consider what is said, for example, about Bellow’s response to the death of his mother, in 1933, when he was 17 years old. In the second chapter this is described as a ‘lifelong mourning … a bondage doomed to play itself out in five marriages and a string of failed ...”

“... finished off with a varnish that has aged into a rich yellowy-brown: the total effect is sometimes said to resemble an etching, which is true enough, though it resembles something else even more, as Colin Harrison says in his excellent handbook to Palmer: a carved ivory. The Valley Thick with Corn is one of the most beautiful expressions of what Palmer’s son ...”

“... an earlier volume, Labels, an account of a Mediterranean voyage, he did not write much about Port Said because, he said, his experiences there ‘approximate too nearly to English life’, but almost everything feels like a version of home. The cathedral at Málaga reminds him of the chapel at Hertford, his old Oxford ...”

“... much needed, since Annan’s own powers of expression were wooden to say the least. This pair, Edward Mortimer and Nader Mousavizadeh, came from the Financial Times and the New Republic respectively, two publications whose political profiles need little specification. Not surprisingly, Annan’s various pronouncements, applauded for their eloquence by ...”

“... as little more than an invitation to fraud’. Sanford Levinson, a progressive law professor, said that he had become increasingly dismayed by ‘the costs to intellectual honesty of the felt need to shoehorn one’s arguments into the language of “diversity”’. In 2014, Students for Fair Admissions, a group created by ...”

“... way. Just as he is a mystic literalist, so too he is a natural stylist. He knew this. He wrote to Edward Marsh about his poetry, thus: ‘I have always tried to get an emotion out in its own course, without altering it.’ And yet, he added, ‘it needs the finest instinct imaginable, much finer than the skill of the craftsmen.’ Lawrence’s naturalness as ...”

“... Mulder (although that former minister has since gone into spectacular political eclipse). He said that ‘when the National Party policy is taken to its logical conclusion, there will no longer be a black man in South Africa who has South African citizenship.’ Theconjuring trick is achieved by bringing about the independence of the Homelands, so ...”

“... in the footsteps of Gogol in Dead Souls – a matter Mr Hingley does not discuss. ‘I realise,’ said Chekhov, ‘that Gogol will turn in his grave, being Russian literature’s King of the Steppe. I’ve well-meaningly trespassed on his preserves, but I haven’t half botched things.’ Yegorushka’s journey reaches a high point at the country inn run by ...”

“... the delicious Money-Coutts. (Money Counts?) There was even a triple-barrelled name: Edward Packe-Drury-Lowe – inherently absurd because of the prospect of infinite fission: if triple, why not quadruple or quintuple? One of the boys in my house had the surname Christie. His father owned Glyndebourne. ‘Christie’ meant something to me, so I ...”

“... bon viveur, friend of Proust and president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Paris. Lewis said that in 1968 he ‘engaged the services’ of Marion Mainwaring, a Radcliffe graduate and freelance writer living in Paris, to pursue the ‘Parisian phase’ of Edith Wharton’s life and in particular ‘the matter of Morton Fullerton’. And Lewis ...”

“... often they did not return. Trimble’s political career began with the prorogation of Stormont by Edward Heath on 24 March 1972 – ‘I am,’ he says, ‘the product of the destruction of Stormont’ – but it was fuelled by grief and anger along the way. Grief especially at the murder by the IRA of his close friend and colleague in the Queen’s ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... woman called Margherita, who happened to be the wife of a minor Medici. Her aggrieved husband said she ‘was taken against her will by the Count of Mirandola’s men, was put on a horse and carried off’. Pico’s sister claimed that Margherita was in love with him all along and would have followed him anywhere, no force necessary. His nephew and ...”

“... seeing old school friends would make him uneasy, in case they ‘remembered the words that I said the day the King was beheaded’. Scholarships took him to Cambridge, where he might have been expected to prepare for the law or the church, but he doesn’t seem to have pursued any particular career. Illness may have checked his ambition: bladder stones ...”