“... on in his time at the brutal US prison camp in Kandahar, Begg got a visit from two MI5 agents, ‘Andrew’ and ‘Matt’. He recognised Andrew; Begg ran an Islamic bookshop in Birmingham in the late 1990s and like many politically active Muslims in England, he was visited at home by MI5. ‘Seeing a British person, I had ...”

“... of reconciliation with his friends. Newspapers are ‘they’ and we, after all, are ‘we’. As Andrew Boyle relates, it turned out that a great many old acquaintances of Burgess and Maclean were much more horrified – felt, indeed, much more betrayed – by the fact that the late Goronwy Rees gave a version of their flight to the People than by the flight ...”

“... Publicist’, the liveliest story in Jessica Francis Kane’s first collection, Bending Heaven, a young woman moves to Manhattan to pursue a career in publishing, and as part of a family tradition: ‘All the women on my mother’s side have come to New York, lived, burned out, and eventually left.’ She falls into the enthusiastic world of publicity, where ...”

“... maybe a conviction, as Evans has it, that ‘almost nothing any adult did for him when he was young did him any good.’ He saw abroad as a merciful place to be – the lost parts of Spain, Yemen, North Africa, Arabia – and the quality of his writing attests to the degree of his wonder at leaving home. Lewis, Evans writes, was ‘an escapist by reflex ...”

“... in the Bank of England, who was tried on a charge of complicity to defraud the bank of £10,000. Young Turner was acquitted, but the affair is still referred to as ‘Turner’s Fraud’. Frederick William Turner, our author’s father, was a churchgoer and a teetotaller, a desk-man in the Post Office Engineering Department in Liverpool. Ernest Turner was ...”

“... had the luck of the persistent, finding not only local builder, architect and sculptor friends of young Jeanneret still hale and hearty in the Seventies, but a full set of journals kept by his father. The anonymity of boyhood once over, this is a life which turns out to be almost absurdly well documented; and Brooks profits from his own diligence to present ...”

“... in the 1970s they stuck it into education,’ said Iain. ‘They said, “We’ll invest in the young,” and out of that they developed high standards of environmental protection. And those people are now voting. Next thing we knew they want 10p on plastic bags. But we have not done environmental stewardship before now, that’s why people think the whole ...”

“... out of two), Randall Garrison, Donald Stallybrass, Ellery Akers, Peter Abbs, John Hodgen, Andrew Motion, Edwin Drummond, Gregory Harrison, Gordon Mason and Robert Ballard, Isabel Nathaniel and Peter Didsbury, Anthony Edkins and Brian Cosgrove. Several get prizes, and in particular Andrew Motion gets the big ...”

“... regulating the breakfast tea. Mrs Melville is the mother of Johnston, a British army officer whose young wife, Helen, is scarcely good enough for her son. They have a child, Jackie, whose nervous disposition makes the rest of them look like Dumbarton Rock, and into this set-up the man from Poland arrives, expecting little. It is a novel in which history keeps ...”

“... going into the historical origins of Whitehall’s almost pathological obsession with secrecy. A young investigative journalist, with a healthy distaste for oligarchy in a country which boasts too much about its imagined heritage of freedom, Leigh is aware that many British institutions are secretive about their activities to a greater or less extent. State ...”

“... of the attack, a covert campaign called Operation Wrath of God. Beginning with the shooting of a young Palestinian, Wael Zwaiter, as he walked up the stairs to his apartment in Rome, the hit team killed nine people over the course of the next two years. Some were gunned down in the street; others were dispatched by bombs planted in homes or cars. In July ...”

“... carapaces into the Beagle’s wake. Four small tortoises did make it back to England but were too young to have developed island-specific characteristics. The finches – emblematic of Darwin’s greatest Galapagos triumph – were in fact his nadir. Not only did he fail to label which islands his specimens came from, but he completely overlooked the ...”

“... the kitchen-sink ‘revolution’ in British culture, to say nothing of the strain it put on the young artists themselves. The waistcoat-and-watch-chain world of English publishing – as well as the carmine-and-limelight world of Terence Rattigan and the formal English stage – hadn’t the lexicon or the accents of the apprentice boys and shopgirls ...”

“... Adjika’ – a very hot Georgian sauce – ‘but not so sharp!’)The crowd was overwhelmingly young. Many of them had been alerted to the protests through the nexus of Tbilisi’s flourishing nightclubs, which feature entertainment ranging from heavy metal drag to the Georgian National Ballet. Acting as communal centres for the generation born after ...”

“... disrobed on the set, at the studios of Twentieth-Century Fox. Just as she did so, there appeared a young man with a camera. On assignment for Life (expecting to take some pretty pictures of the actress in performance) his eyes nearly popped out of his head. Marilyn, he was alert enough to know, had not been photographed naked since the late Forties, when she ...”