“... but then infiltrate the camp of their Thracian allies purely for the sake of loot: the magnificent white horses that pull the gold and silver chariot of Rhesus, their chief. They know of the horses from their hapless captive Dolon, a weakling who tells all (including relevant intel on Hector) in a desperate plea to be spared. He is reassured by Odysseus in ...”

“... with whom they shared an interest in theory. Initially, Jones, together with Jeremy Dixon and Michael Gold, worked for the firm of Frederick Macmanus and Partners, for whom they designed a glassy, Mediterranean block of flats and shops in Clipstone Street in Fitzrovia, a hall of residence for Woolwich Polytechnic and two blocks as part of that ...”

“... until they have ripped the guts out of these decent Victorian villas to turn them into models of white and modish minimalism.5 March. On my walk I pass the Primrose Hill Community Library, which is closed to borrowers today but open for children, who throng the junior library, some of them sitting with an adult presumably learning to read, others in groups ...”

“... Gown (1987), which describes his introduction to counterintelligence in London during the war, and Michael Holzman’s James Jesus Angleton: The CIA and the Craft of Counterintelligence (2008). But Angleton laid out on the page is nothing like Angleton in the room. When he wanted someone to understand the Monster Plot – someone like David Blee, for ...”

“... the ship was seized by rumours that a French clairvoyant had predicted that the sinking of a white whale (the ship’s nickname) would lead to the final world war, a tale strengthened by the fact that Canberra’s postal number was the same as that of the Beast in the film Omen – 666. The kelpers disconcerted them even more with their ...”

“... the mistake of appearing to be America’s surrogate in Europe; he, at least, never fawned on the White House. Heath is the nearest thing This Blessed Plot has to a politician-hero; apart from Roy Jenkins the other heroes are the usually unsung civil servants: Lee, O’Neill, Robinson, Butler, Palliser etc, who shepherded us into the Community with a skill ...”

“... thousands of books in his Kremlin apartment and at his dacha in Kuntsevo. There was émigré, White Guard literature, and there were works by old acquaintances whom he had killed: Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin. Their books, confiscated everywhere else in the country, lived on in his library. In the Khrushchev period the library was broken up, and ...”

“... executioners claim to believe in it too, any more than you find Morocco unpleasant just because Michael Portillo drops in on the place occasionally. In Orwell’s view, it was the Stalinist Left that had betrayed the common people, not democratic socialists like himself. Orwell first encountered Stalinism in the squalid betrayals of the Spanish Civil ...”

“... or coloured, though rust-coloured, iron-containing spa waters were once very fashionable; milk-white glacial meltwater may or may not be potable; and naturally bubbly spring waters command a fancy price. You do not want to see rotting organic matter floating in your water and, even if you cannot see it, smell often betrays its putrefying ...”

“... a guise of compassion.Later the same year A Minority by ‘Gordon Westwood’ (the sociologist Michael Schofield) presented the results of interviews with 127 queer men, with statistical breakdowns of where and how often they found partners, and of patterns of friendship and courtship which turned out to be much like hetero ones. The result is pleasingly ...”

“... for Jeanne Dielman, was that of her parents’ home: ‘glossy tiles in a brighter shade of white’, ‘modern and functional furniture’, a glass coffee pot, a fireplace with fake logs, vases placed on doilies, nesting tables. This is where the nouveau roman influence ends. The woman of the title has left her husband and tells her neighbour ...”

“... that Sandd put through his door after he resigned, advertising his job: a picture of four smiling white people in Sandd blue, striding down the road with light sheaves of paper, grinning. ‘Keep busy outdoors, in charge of your own time,’ it read. ‘Ideal for students, housewives and pensioners.’ He showed me a day’s work from just after ...”

“... for languages or football: because it’s beautiful. I have no idea what stars were rising when Michael Wood’s The Road to Delphi: The Life and Afterlife of Oracles pushed onto the planet’s surface, but so brainy a book must have a lot of air signs in its chart. It seems at first to have been born under the sign of Aquarius: analytical, determinedly ...”

“... the Soviet Union as a foreigner and not become obsessed with spying. (If anyone doubts this, read Michael Frayn’s wonderful novel The Russian Interpreter, published the year I first went to Moscow.) ‘Do you think X is a spy?’ we were always asking each other about new Russian acquaintances, and sometimes about each other. It was a question that went the ...”

“... union with 1.4 million members (more than one in five of the national total), had a glossy red and white stage set with an arch, through which its general secretary, Len McCluskey, could be seen giving frequent television interviews. Most of the other stalls were smaller and more homespun. Two were for campaigns about the victimisation of union members: the ...”