“... its title. Not many readers will get the allusion here to Tocqueville and Beaumont in America by George Wilson Pierson, published in 1938 and for a long time the standard account of the nine-month journey which Tocqueville undertook with his friend Gustave de Beaumont, ostensibly for the purpose of writing a report on the American prison system, but which ...”

“... among the many people who assisted them in their rewriting of their past. The Duke’s brother, George VI, made every effort to ensure that the fact that the King of England had been a Hitler supporter before the war was kept under wraps. Armand Grégoire, the Duchess’s Nazi lawyer, was tried for collusion with the enemy and sent to prison for ...”

“... intimacy with the royal family was the jealousy it aroused among less favoured acquaintances. At a ball at Londonderry House the Queen sent for Osbert and was ‘too charming for words ... I saw one or two people I don’t like looking very cross.’ At the Duchess of Sutherland’s he was less fortunate but he was solaced by a short chat with Queen Mary. Her ...”

“... to take a look at all those cheesecake photos they were always taking of her: throwing a beach-ball; licking an ice-cream cone. A drawer full of images was spread out before her. After a little while, according to Lee Server’s new biography, she ‘kind of shrugged, and she said: “Jeez . . . From the way people went on so, I thought I was ...”

“... the special CIA unit tasked with hunting Osama bin Laden. ‘She just looked in her crystal ball and it said that he was bad,’ one of her co-workers told Jane Mayer of the New Yorker. The error was exposed in 2005 by the New York Times. The CIA completed its own review of the case in 2007. It turned out that Bikowsky didn’t have probable cause, or ...”

“... Die Frau ohne Schatten and Arabella. These, I would say, constitute half a safety-net, half a ball and chain, meaning that Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874-1929) won’t ever go away. All the same, when one thinks of him in English, he’s nothing like the author of a yellow ten-volume set of works that he is in German – five of plays, three of essays and ...”

“... sympathetic. On reading a review of Adam Bede in 1859, Bodichon intuited, brilliantly, that ‘George Eliot’ was Evans’s pseudonym. (George Eliot’s Romola was a tribute to her.) The example of Evans-Lewes made Bodichon willing to contemplate a ‘free union’ with Evans’s ex-partner John Chapman, the editor of ...”

“... when confronted with the white-sheeted lynch mob: ‘the one nearest him had on a silvery basket-ball warm-up jacket with CELTICS written across the chest ... He was no more than four or five steps away ... powerfully built ... His jacket was open ... a white T-shirt ... tremendous chest muscles ... a square face ... wide jaws ... a wide mouth ... What was ...”

“... jerky bowling action (they suspect him of achieving his extraordinary bounce by chucking the ball rather than bowling it). Muralitharan didn’t disappoint either his supporters or his critics, but the Australians had the last laugh. Ponting’s team won 3-0, despite the fact that they conceded a first innings lead in each game, and despite ...”

“... has analogies with another new theatrical fashion: the ‘humours comedy’ of the mid 1590s – George Chapman’s An Humorous Days Mirth (1597) and Jonson’s Every Man in His Humour (1598) are well-known examples – and the slicker, smuttier ‘city comedies’ of Thomas Middleton, Thomas Dekker, John Marston et al, which follow slightly later. Like the ...”

“... West in She Done Him Wrong and I’m No Angel. Best of all – albeit in a big failure – he met George Cukor and Katharine Hepburn on a film, Sylvia Scarlett, that was too daring for its time, in which he played Jimmy Monkley, a Cockney con artist, and felt able to be himself.He needed this, for his life was in crisis. In late 1933, at his father’s ...”

“... It opens with an image of a garden in St Petersburg, where the tsar’s children are tossing a ball back and forth: ‘It fell among the flowerbeds./Or fled to the north gate.//A daylight moon hung up/In the Western sky, bald white.’ The trajectory of the lost toy is symbolic of the march of history, moving ‘eastward among the stars/Toward February and ...”

“... this Edenic oasis is no exception. (An incautious nine-iron shot, for instance, may loft one’s ball into the abutting refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila; a mishap which the well-liked professional, Mr ‘Sami’ Ibrahim, counts as an extra stroke.) Other unwelcome reminders are not wanting. The honours boards tell their own distressing story. Recording as ...”

“... were thus outwitted. There is, however, another interpretation: that the judges hoofed the ball into their own net. What they were in effect saying was this: we’ll go along with what the publishers propose, we’re sure they can judge a novel just as well if not better than us. So let’s dutifully plough through these three bodice-rippers from ...”

“... obscure and improbable Helicons. This addiction would have astounded the good Dr Struve who, in George IV’s Brighton, operated his German Spa with a row of taps offering the ‘factitious’, or homemade, waters of Ems, Baden Baden, Pyrmont and the best Bohemian springs; an enterprise which saw him widely patronised and widely reviled. At least it was ...”