“... steps’ towards its creation. But however long you pick over Bevin’s correspondence with George Marshall and Arthur Vandenberg in search of British genius, the story doesn’t fit. Secret meetings between the US, UK and Canada to set up the alliance began at the Pentagon just five days after the Treaty of Brussels was signed in March 1948, leading to ...”

“... George Osborne​ gets booed at the London Olympics. Suella Braverman cracks gags during her visit to a half-built asylum detention centre in Rwanda. Boris Johnson is illegally presented with a birthday cake. A Tory staffer throws up as the exit poll drops. David Cameron keeps his bladder full all night to achieve maximum focus during EU negotiations ...”

“... Lindbergh arrives, Nijinsky goes mad, Isadora Duncan breaks her neck, the shocking Josephine Baker came from St Louis, like T.S. Eliot, the man who pronounced printemps to be cruel. The interest is in the detail, not the thesis. A chapter on Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, and another on Hitler, the great aestheticiser (‘Nazism was a ...”

“... how a ‘leave’ decision could be managed politically – something that must haunt Cameron and George Osborne, for all the latter’s daily attempts in the Evening Standard to peddle the idea that this is ‘May’s Brexit crisis’.There is indeed a crisis, but it’s not unmanageable. In late March, Parliament voted to ‘take control’, in the hope of ...”

“... the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-9, conservative politicians like George Osborne and Wolfgang Schäuble continued to insist that the space of democratic decision-making was, whether people liked it or not, tightly constrained by what the markets would permit. One of Osborne’s first acts on entering the Treasury in May 2010 ...”

“... has hitherto been in his pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, the worse he is likely to behave (George Sorabji, a Nobel Prize-winning astronomer and host of a wildly successful TV programme called Mathematics the Universal Language, resorts to physical violence).The only one Ludo wouldn’t mind having as a father is a personable and unfailingly generous ...”

“... Moscow again in July 1991, where the Start Treaty reducing strategic nuclear weapons was signed by George H.W. Bush – only weeks before the putsch which effectively brought Gorbachev down. Taubman details every move, and reveals the intricate weaving of preparations between these summits. Occasionally he overdoes it. His account of the Washington meeting in ...”

“... son to prolong his legacy. For the men who came to rule the United States with the inauguration of George W. Bush, the Syrian menace was nothing new. Some of them had long wanted to wage war against Iraq as a way of containing Syria. ‘Israel can shape its strategic environment, in co-operation with Turkey and Jordan, by weakening, containing and even rolling ...”

“... meant to play by the same Washington rules that created the policy disasters he inherited from George W. Bush. Obama had retreated into politics as usual. He never looked back. One did not have to be a sentimental utopian to be disappointed. In domestic affairs, Obama’s obeisance to the Washington consensus led him to abandon the bold approach he ...”

“... have to be taken away to a place of safety; the boy is later released. The ludicrous Mr Kenneth Baker blames the Church, and in particular the Bishop of Liverpool, David Sheppard, probably because he’s the only socialist in sight.22 February. A large crowd gathers outside Bootle Magistrates Court, to jeer as the vans carrying the two ten-year-olds accused ...”

“... the hedge fund Marshall Wace, with $50 million of seed capital raised from friends, family and George Soros. It now manages $69 billion in assets. Like many hedge fund managers, Marshall casts himself as a disruptive outsider. Even those who say they know him well describe him as detached, almost inscrutable. But almost all agree that his worldview has ...”

“... the renowned pastry shop whose speciality mtaqaba was a great family favourite. A wizened old baker was in there stoking the oven, but his ancient form suggested something only barely surviving. Astonishingly, Said Sr, the Jerusalem relicvendor, turned into an ace moderniser: he was the man who, via his Egyptian business, introduced filing and the ...”

“... He had little education, and had worked as a miner, a domestic servant, a factory worker, a baker and an estate agent. He was also endlessly genial, resourceful, and an instinctive radical. He adopted the young Mandela, put him up in his house, got him a job, got him into university, and paid his fees, while his wife, Albertina, found him a wife in ...”

“... to depart for Hungary ‘since you know the Balkans’. Major Grand’s Chief of Staff, the late George Taylor, who had come from Australia (it is very much that kind of story), was unimpressed when I objected that while I had sojourned in Yugoslavia, a manner of Katmandu for the dissident young of those remote times, I had never done so in Hungary, which ...”

“... side. ‘A shadow would come over the ship as soon as you heard you were coaling,’ said George Michael Clarkson (Joiner First Class). The great enemy was dust. All doors would be sealed; small holes were filled with oakum; lifeboats were hoisted outboard; officers and men alike wore their oldest clothes and poked Vaseline up their nostrils and ...”