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“... and the shutters have been folded back so that the room opens directly onto Camden High Street. In France or New York this would excite no comment. In London, or in Camden Town at any rate, it draws the jeers of every passing drunk. Kids on their way to the Emerald Ballroom stop and stare. Jovial blacks. To dine like this in England is somehow to advertise ...”

“... To my mind, it is useless to search for an explanation. It is a kind of genius. And the critic Peter Heyworth wrote of her Medea in the theatre at Epidaurus: ‘Maria Callas is much nearer to ancient Greece than to revolutionary France. While Cherubini trundles out his clichés, she storms the heights with ...”

“... and semi- autobiographical psychodrama’ of gender roles, incest and revenge she made with Peter Whitehead, which was slated by critics). She also produced consumer items such as furniture, scarves, inflatable toy Nanas – ‘my dream is for things to be in the street, for everyone, so kids can play with them’ – and jewellery and perfume in ...”

“... died when special forces stormed the building in 2002. The opaque circular forms depicted in Peter Lanyon’s Black Stone (1964), Jennifer Dickson’s In Limbo (1967) and Jem Southam’s Ditchling Beacon (1999) recall a wonderful moment in Shadow Sites I when the mirror of a pond or small reservoir stares darkly up at us out of the arid ...”

“... Toby. His mother, he tells us, died of a heart attack two years ago. He hates brown and yellow, France, his foodstuffs touching on the plate, and the sight of four yellow cars in a row (an experience presumably so rare that it suggests some calculation on his part to avoid having a bad day). Christopher’s candour is winning: I made my own list in response ...”

“... were killed. Very “Dick”, somehow.’) Later, as a self-satisfied bestselling author: ‘Peter has to write a third leader on Mosley and the BUF. I told him I’d met Mosley and been impressed with the man . . . a fair amount of what Mosley says, in the current climate, can’t be dismissed as fanaticism or bombast – he’s no Mussolini.’ And ...”

“... of a common Russian sensibility such as Tolstoy had imagined in his dancing scene’. Since Peter the Great, however, this ‘common Russian sensibility’ always contained a European admixture, and Figes criticises those – Rilke, Thomas Mann, Virginia Woolf – who swallowed whole the myth of a completely indigenous ‘Russian soul’. All the great ...”

“... no, I can quite see how it might fail a seriousness test. (One can almost hear the shade of Peter Cook, intoning regretfully how he ‘never had the reading for the spying’.) Lord Kim, on the other hand, might just about have served, given the fact that H. St John Philby got himself called everything from sahib to tuan all across the British ...”

“... autumn of 1943. The Spaniards, who numbered about two thousand, were Republicans who had fled to France after Franco’s victory in 1939. Later, the Vichy Government had handed them over to the Germans. As conscripted labourers they received the same rates of pay as the volunteers recruited by the OT. They were free in the evenings and on Sundays to come and ...”

“... early 17th centuries. Against the grim background of protracted civil war in the Netherlands, in France and in Germany, Neostoicism offered a philosophy of fortitude and consolation not merely to intellectuals but to princes and statesmen. It was a philosophy for laymen, who found in pagan literature a restorative retreat from the conflicting ideologies of ...”

“... the past 15 years. From the early Eighties, Western European socialist-led administrations – in France, Spain and Italy, then in Scandinavia – began to bend to the free-market gale blowing throughout the capitalist world. In Australasia, Labour governments, which were elected on traditional corporatist or social-democratic platforms, were quick to adopt ...”

“... a 24-year-old American, Gordon Ray, who had just finished a doctorate on ‘Thackeray and France’. It was an eccentric choice: they could have had their pick of British biographers. But they wanted someone as remote from London’s gossip circuits as possible. Ray – as was standard practice for academic biographers – intended to lay the ...”

“... appalled by the touch of a female. After a brisk march through the history of sainthood – from Peter and Paul to the Reformation in just ninety pages – Bartlett turns to a leisured exploration of liturgical commemoration, relics and shrines, pilgrimage, church dedications, personal and place names, images of the saints and literary genres, including ...”

“... Peter Hennessy’s new book hasn’t persuaded me that its central preoccupation, the current dispute over prime ministerial power and its extent, is not sterile and, indeed, rather boring – yet it is a splendid read. The truth is that the Westminster system is quite inadequately democratic and transparent, and Hennessy is, if anything, too respectful and conventional in his proposals about how the office might be reformed ...”

“... we gleaned from German encrypted messages, but the chief of the SIS dissuaded him. Through Peter Floud, the brother of Bernard Floud, a Party member he had met in the Intelligence Corps, James arranged a meeting with a Russian who seemed to be an embassy official. (Sixty years later, after James’s death, it emerged that this was probably Ivan ...”