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“... Abendroth made exhaustive use of German archival sources in Hitler in der spanischen Arena (1973); Robert Whealey devoted a well-informed chapter to the matter in Hitler and Spain (1989); and there are two monographs based on German and Spanish archival material, Economic Relations between Nazi Germanyand Franco’s Spain (1996) by Christian Leitz and ...”

“... types’, Summerscale calls them. Several were free-thinkers, proto-Darwinians – the publisher Robert Chambers, for example, secret author of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, and George Combe himself – though, like Darwin, they hesitated to spell it out. The Drysdales too saw the universe in largely materialist terms, finding it hard to ...”

“... as simple as that? By Christmas last year it was clear that New Labour was presiding over a new winter of discontent, with the Government’s management of everything from the health service and cattle disease to public transport under fierce popular scrutiny. John Prescott, with his two Jaguars and his immense self-satisfaction, became an obvious target ...”

“... and the other artists who could be considered Yiddish modernists – the painters Nathan Altman, Robert Falk and, for a time, El Lissitzky, the composers Lev Pulver and Moshe Milner, the writer who called himself Der Nister – were defined by the struggle to integrate these two tendencies. ‘Our first imprimatur is our modernism, our leftism and our ...”

“... Over the winter, you may have seen posters for a movie, certificate 12A (‘moderate fantasy violence and horror . . . limited bloody images’): a bunch of teenagers, Hollywood-dishy, but coloured to look like corpses, with greenish-tarnished complexions and uncanny eyes. The movie, Twilight, is about a coven of high-school vampires in the American Pacific Northwest, and is adapted from the first of a series of four novels by Stephenie Meyer; the last instalment, Breaking Dawn, came out last year ...”

“... was a bestseller and a sequel was commissioned. He completed his Spanish Civil War novel, Winter in Madrid (2006), anyway. Since then he has published another modern thriller, Dominion (2012), which imagines Britain under Nazi occupation, and six further books set in Tudor England, progressing from publishing success to phenomenon. He has now sold ...”

“... Ireland to Amsterdam, subsisting on boiled roots and the word of God. Even mature figures such as Robert Browne, who in the 1580s lent his name to Ainsworth’s brethren (‘Brownists’), wavered in and out of conformity as conscience and courage dictated. It helped their enemies that some puritans were not only flaky but mad. William Hacket, a ...”

“... with the possible exception of Cambridge, where there was nothing to offend the eye, and going in winter as I did in those days one would find the Piazza San Marco empty. It was at the Accademia with its thin walls that I first overheard sexual intercourse, and the shout of a man coming, ‘Vengo! Vengo!’28 January. Today was Dad’s birthday. He was very ...”

“... Early in​ 1971, Robert Hughes, recently appointed as Time magazine’s chief art critic, was ripping out his loft apartment at 143 Prince Street when he received an unexpected visitor. This was Henry Geldzahler, curator of modern art at the Metropolitan Museum. Hughes, probably the most macho and combative critic in his profession, was, by his own account, sweaty, foul-tempered, sore-footed and ‘grey with ingrained dirt ...”

“... the year Clarke returned to Ireland, a book called Sidelights on the Home Rule Movement, by Sir Robert Anderson, a police commissioner, was published – it helped inspire Conrad’s novel The Secret Agent. The relevant passage was an account of a conversation between Gladstone’s home secretary, Sir William Harcourt, and a police chief. While Clarke was ...”

“... proposition that the body was nothing more than a complex system of measurable physical processes. Robert Koch’s Institute in Berlin was the epicentre for the bacteriological revolution – one pathogen, one disease and, we hope, one vaccine, one cure – which still dominates medical thinking. And so on. By the end of the 19th century the institutional ...”

“... cucumbers and tomatoes are grown; in the tomato greenhouse growth is driven along through the winter by stadium lighting. In 2009, Thanet Earth’s first year in production, 2.5 million tomatoes left the glasshouses for the sorting area in an average week; the cucumber and pepper harvests peaked at half a million and three-quarters of a million a ...”

“... could be married and a film born.The back office deity of that era was the seven-times-married Robert Evans, who ran production at Paramount for a decade from 1966, when the studio made The Godfather and The Godfather Part II, Chinatown and Rosemary’s Baby. The ghost of Evans haunts Pandora’s Box, which covers the time some perhaps premature ...”

“... tell you not only that he meets the top people, but that he parades his ego before them: In the winter of 1998 I interviewed the Prime Minister of Thailand, Chuan Leekpai. Half joking, half serious, I began the interview by looking across the table at him and saying: ‘Mr Prime Minister, I have a confession to make. I helped oust your predecessor and I ...”

“... longevity. She was surely the only person to have inspected the defences around Madrid in the winter of 1937 and, nearly sixty years later, heard Mandela address a multiracial Parliament in Cape Town. It wasn’t that Martha clung to life; it clung to her, piling on the years like a Berber potter loading his donkey. For that alone, she’s been thought of ...”