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“... Paul Ferdonnet and André Olbrecht, who recorded programmes in Stuttgart; in the States, ‘Tokyo Rose’, Mildred Gillars (‘Axis Sally’) and Ezra Pound, who was indicted for broadcasting from Italy; in Britain, John Amery and P.G. Wodehouse, who was cold-shouldered for giving a jaunty talk about life in his internment camp. Lord Haw-Haw was the most ...”

“... however, it was the Lion defying the Eagle – practically, it was JOHN BULL DEFYING BROTHER JONATHAN. A committee of prominent citizens, however, led by Washington Irving, persuaded Macready not to cut short his engagement: steps would be taken to make sure that there were no more unpleasant incidents. At all costs, the honour and civility of New York ...”

“... Brick, has vanished into the vault, as have Noah Baumbach’s unfinished pilot for a TV version of Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, starring Ewan McGregor, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Greta Gerwig, a Ridley Scott-directed pilot for a rejected show called The Vatican, and many others.After Chase shot the pilot for The Sopranos, ten months went by before HBO got ...”

“... started fining parents for picking up their children late, the incidence of late pick-ups actually rose. As that example suggests, upping the opportunity cost of a particular behaviour by fines may fail to deter it if the fine shifts its context from social co-operation to commerce. But then the externality – here, the higher incidence of late pick-ups ...”

“... writer. So if Rick Moody tells us that Lydia Davis is ‘the best prose stylist in America’, and Jonathan Franzen that ‘few writers now working make the words on the page matter more,’ does this make her better or worse equipped to render the best prose stylist of 19th-century France into 21st-century American English? Davis’s stories, typically from ...”

“... already done: by Gill on ‘Salisbury Plain’, by Butler on ‘The Ruined Cottage’, by Jacobus, Jonathan Wordsworth and others. Elsewhere he is less successful. His history is more literary-biographical than intellectual, and he passes by without comment significant work in intellectual history. James Chandler’s Wordsworth’s Second Nature (1984) goes ...”

“... his own words, a ‘visionary’ speech, and he wrote it all himself, in the study overlooking the Rose Garden at Chequers, a single draft composed with little hesitation and no agonising. While he wrote it, he picked up from the desk a silver and gold inkstand given to Chamberlain in 1937, with an inscription that reads: ‘To stand on the ancient ways, to ...”

“... the strategy backfired. Because the military profession was reserved to Mamluks, some of them rose to positions of great power and transcended their original ‘slave’ status, and a Mamluk elite eventually emerged. In 1250 it seized power in Egypt and Syria and established the Mamluk Sultanate, with its capital in Cairo. Later the Ottomans would recycle ...”

“... graph showing British troop numbers in Basra smoothly falling away as numbers in Helmand gradually rose. There was a cross on the chart where the two lines met. This would have been fine if Basra had stayed quiet, but as the time approached when the first troops were due to land in Helmand, it became more and more evident that the British had failed to bring ...”

“... history that was being published in the Eighties, particularly by Roy Porter. Michael Neve and Jonathan Miller separately suggested that the madness of George III would make a play, and Neve lent me The Royal Malady by Charles Chenevix Trench, which is still the best account of the King’s illness and the so-called Regency Crisis. I also read George III ...”

“... who recognised his gifts and took him with his other clever boys down the Calton Hill to Rose Street. In those days, a sort of café society still flourished in Edinburgh. You knew which set you’d find in which pub, and young Karl was introduced to the mighty poets of Milne’s Bar and the Abbotsford: Hugh MacDiarmid, Norman MacCaig and Robert ...”

“... sky seemed to be taking on An ashy blankness, behind which there lay Tonalities of lilac and dusty rose Tarnishing now to something more than dusk, Crepuscular and funerary greys, The streets became more luminous, the world Glinted and shone with an uncanny freshness. The drama in Hecht’s war letters, as the editor points out, is ‘more reminiscent of ...”

“... professional humiliation. In the 1999 production of Antony and Cleopatra at Stratford the curtain rose with Antony on his knees pleasuring the Egyptian queen of Frances de la Tour. Even the jaded eyebrows of Stratford went up a bit at this and just before it transferred to the Barbican Alan rang and began without preamble: ‘I’m sure you will be relieved ...”

“... It became clear that Britain had joined at too high a rate in 1990. When German interest rates rose in the aftermath of reunification the consequences were ruinous for Major’s strategy, with the Bank of England unable to defend sterling, despite putting interest rates up by two points in a single day. The German rate rise was a consequence of the ...”

“... empires came and went, that other schemes of control were devised and failed, that other peoples rose up, rid themselves of foreign rulers, and brought in regimes that were sometimes worse but often a good deal better than their predecessors – all this seems scarcely to have mattered in the calculations of Reagan and his Administration. Just as important ...”