“... rather to my surprise) and a German of remarkable handsomeness and Royal physique. I merely held the gloves, as it were, but it was quite interesting en plein air.’ Then it’s on to Spoleto: ‘This place is mad – Festival of Fifty Queens, it ought to be called. Marvellous characters and camp little restaurants and art shops. Americans, gorgeous ...”

“... bourgeois, his sympathies anti-fascist. As a young man in December 1944 he was arrested and held in harsh prison conditions by the occupying Nazis until their expulsion from the city the following April. He studied medicine in Padua, where he specialised in mental and nervous diseases but read widely in existentialism and ...”

“... younger, who in the mid-1960s in London brought Cunningham to dinner with the photographer David Montgomery, and Montgomery who gave him the first camera he started using seriously. (Cunningham is a key figure in the new documentary on Lopez, Ramos and their crowd, Antonio Lopez 1970: Sex Fashion & Disco; it was his last interview, and the film is ...”

“... progressive, and in favour of freedom, though less often at the barrel of a gun, at least a gun held by an American soldier. One of Whipple’s key sources is Antony Blinken, a habitual punner who plays guitar in a DC cover band called Coalition of the Willing, specialising in tunes by the Stones and Clapton. Blinken has worked for Biden on and off since ...”

“... and his most willing slave.In the second volume, there is more space for villains as Mary is held in many damp castles. There are new rules at every move, plus plots, counterplots and torture. Mary suffers despair and writes many appeals. Bess of Hardwick and Paulet are among her tormentors. It is clear how the story will end; Plaidy writes with the same ...”

“... to take. Chums winced to see T.S. Eliot spooning with wife No 2, smirked when they brazenly held hands, and there was a bit of that with Auden. Look at it from the friends’ point of view. They have to budge up to make room for the new companion, knowing as they do so that they will be seeing less of the great man. Pretty college boy introduced to ...”

“... the British medievalist T.F. Tout, who taught at the University of Manchester, where Fawtier had held a lectureship for five years after the First World War. Tout was known for the Ford Lectures he had delivered in Oxford in 1913 on the reign of Edward II, and above all for his six-volume Chapters in the Administrative History of Medieval England. Fawtier ...”

“... disparaged the culture of gift-giving on which that influence seemed to rely. The diplomat David Urquhart’s neurosis about Russian influence at Constantinople derived from his failure to persuade Ottoman officials to accept his proposals for a free-trade treaty; his Eurocentric perspective led him to smell a Russian plot. Britain used its naval power ...”

“... teachers released. In January 1997, the ex-felons were invited to a ‘Day of Contrition’ – held, appropriately, in Salem.Crime Stoppers, another product of the 1970s, offered a new avenue of anonymous denunciation for citizens who were too squeamish or too prudent to report directly to the police. Crime Stoppers is now an organisation with ...”

“... then on to Malawi and Zimbabwe, in November 1991, will underestimate the hardiness and courage of David Livingstone, who traversed, on foot, thousands of miles of bush, mountain and swamp, fearsome to behold even from the air. But Livingstone’s country had not been unknown to the Portuguese, established on both east and west coast for centuries. The term ...”

“... as if he were swimming down to land, but kept safe in his mother’s clutch. In the other hand she held the sort of small, shabby suitcase that pulp fiction illustrators give to people running away from their lives – to heroines with gumption, or plausibly handsome yet morally flawed young men. The suitcase holds the protagonists’ future. The man uses his ...”

“... a suspended sentence for sexually assaulting two women on set in 2021). The festival leadership held crisis meetings and was readying to remove the films of the offending directors and actors from the programme when it was revealed that the list was a scam, created by a far-right account on X. Protests and symbols of protest are banned from the red carpet ...”

“... rode into Vienna in an open Mercedes, lifting and lowering his right arm while his left hand ‘held tight to his belt buckle’, as Gregor von Rezzori wrote in Cain, ‘as though he were afraid that his pants might fall down’. This being the age of balcony politics, Hitler appeared on one to announce the Anschluss, the ‘joining’ of Austria to the ...”

“... The fact that he was white, like several other major West Coast jazz musicians, was not generally held against him. Astonishing to discover, especially given how few people outside music know much about him now, that he came second after Charlie Parker in a 1951 Down Beat readers’ poll for Best Alto Sax Player Ever. Even the most partisan Bird-fanciers ...”

“... a painting before, or a piece of sculpture. In 1971 there was work there in my school holidays. I held a light from the wings on a production of Murder in the Cathedral. I remember vividly shining it on the actresses in the chorus as they chanted: Does the bird sing in the south? Only the sea bird cries Driven inland by the storm. What sign of the spring of ...”