“... death in 1658 – he was the de facto laureate to the new state. He also became tutor to William Dutton, who was a member of Cromwell’s household. At this time Marvell was referred to as ‘a notable English-Italo-Machiavellian’ – for reasons that are mysterious he had the reputation of being a crafty and powerful figure. In 1657 he entered the ...”

“... troops were massing in Scotland or near the Channel. Unfortunately, one of the Garbo spies, ‘William Gerbers’, a Swiss-German businessman, was based in Liverpool, where the real ships and troops were gathering. After the invasion, it would seem suspicious that Gerbers hadn’t reported that troops were gathering on the Mersey en route to Casablanca. So ...”

“... spelled the end of Pan Am, which never recovered from the damage to its reputation. The trial at Camp Zeist was the longest and – at a cost of £75 million – the most expensive in Scottish legal history. The appeal hearing was the first Scottish trial to be broadcast live on both television and the internet. Lawyers, politicians, diplomats and relatives ...”

“... was capable of stripping and repairing most mechanical devices. Indeed, at the Everest base-camp he rebuilt the oxygen apparatus, saving weight and improving the flow. Even then, his revised rig weighed about 30 pounds (say, eight volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica) and the bottles were still unreliable. After two failed attempts on the summit by ...”

“... the concordat that would guarantee continued single-family rule. The interpreter was Colonel William Eddy, a senior US intelligence officer and much else besides. Considered too insecure during the ‘global war on terror’, Suez was rejected as a potential venue for the re-enactment: the grandsons of the two principals and Eddy’s nephew had to make ...”

“... being enlightened as to the advantages he himself enjoyed. When war broke out in 1914, he was in camp with the school cadet corps. Although only 16 at the time, he made an attempt, properly frustrated by the medical officer, to join the Artists’ Rifles. ‘From the vantage-point of the late 20th century,’ the biographer says, ‘his eagerness to plunge ...”

“... Feynman soon joined the emigration of the best and brightest physicists to General Groves’s boot camp at Los Alamos. His chief duty there was to run the computer division at a time before computers were available. His tools were a roomful of Babbage-style mechanical calculators, later supplemented with primitive punched-card machines. As a principal ...”

“... for Blunt were predictably more temperate than those who wanted to take away his chair (from this camp came some familiar mythologising about the ‘coldblooded traitor’). It would be interesting to know how many of those who voted for Blunt accepted the opposition’s view that the man’s political past was relevant to his title to a chair. There was some ...”

“... William Joyce, ‘Lord Haw-Haw’, recorded his last ever broadcast from the temporary offices of the German Radio Corporation, in Hamburg, on the day Hitler shot himself. British troops were on the point of entering the city and Joyce and his colleagues had raided the cellars of the Funkhaus, drinking everything they could find ...”

“... contempt for anyone – including himself at a moment of weakness during a ‘selection’ in the camp when the idea of praying crossed his mind – who thinks that God had anything to do with Auschwitz. Levi rejected even non-religious views that seemed to place the horrors in which he participated beyond the limits of ordinary thought and analysis: what he ...”

“... a Friday. Salinger and an army buddy, Paul Fitzgerald, were side by side when they entered the camp and were confronted by row upon row of emaciated bodies naked or in rags, some stacked like cordwood six or eight feet high. For their book Shields and Salerno gathered many witness accounts and photographs of events at Kaufering IV. One of them shows Johann ...”

“... by a Chinese madame whose Thai girls used to serve UN troops in East Timor. Kabul is a city of camp followers, contractors and restaurateurs, who live off foreign armies and government spending programmes. Another hint of vitality is the traffic. Cars, carts, trucks and yellow and white Corolla taxis swarm past bearded old men on three-speed bicycles. They ...”

“... come from the extraordinary George Drysdale. He was born in 1824, the second youngest son of Sir William Drysdale, a leading Edinburgh citizen and one-time City Treasurer. ‘Our idolised boy’, as his sister called him, had a dazzling career at Edinburgh Academy, and in 1841 embarked with no less lustre on a Classics degree at Glasgow. Then the darkness ...”

“... analogy is suggestive. Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto is convincingly read here as high camp. But there are important differences, too. Gothic represents a ruined or fractured realism, excessive because its desire carries it beyond the ego and social convention; Post-Modern horror belongs to an epoch in which horror itself has become ...”

“... the seas and come … to B … a small town fastened to a field in Indiana,’ the late, great William Gass began his imperishable short story ‘In the Heart of the Heart of the Country’, from 1968. Or, with his and your permission, ‘I have sailed the seas and come … to G … a healthcare mecca and football burg that was previously a town with a ...”