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“... agent sent a report claiming that ‘German troops in Norway were training to swim ashore wearing green watertight suits and had been heard practising on Scottish bagpipes.’ Operation Columba was conceived and run by a raggle-taggle band of secret service officers, pigeon-fanciers, aristocratic animal lovers and soldiers, who didn’t always work well ...”

“... or when Lady Layard translated a treatise on lace-making and her husband, Sir Austen Henry Layard, helped to establish a collection of historic Venetian glass on Murano; and above all when John Charles Robinson bought ceramics, metalwork, glass and textiles from Venice for South Kensington, the ‘products of the artisan’ were receiving plenty ...”

“... of Rye, the cobbled and gabled ‘Tinkerbell Towne’, as Burra dubbed it, where memories of Henry James and Stephen Crane were fresh and sightings of Radclyffe Hall and her friend Una, Lady Troubridge, lent a touch of verisimilitude to the farcical Rye that, passed off as ‘Tilling’, was the abode of E.F. Benson’s Mapp and Lucia and ‘Quaint ...”

“... sounds like the title of a novel, and the book isn’t without its literary qualities. Parsing Henry Kissinger’s memoirs, Feeney notes that he ‘presents himself as a sort of Germanic Jeeves, unflappable and long-suffering, who again and again saves the day for his maladroit employer, a malevolent, egregiously Middle American Bertie ...”

“... It is summer, and 12-year-old Frankie Addams sits at the kitchen table with her cousin John Henry and her black cook Berenice and digs a splinter out of her foot with a knife. The three play bridge with an incomplete deck and they talk until their words almost seem to rhyme. They are a group, but a group Frankie wishes desperately not to belong to. She ...”

“... the first history of Dorset’s birds. Of the other characters involved, the Earl of Ilchester was Henry Stephen Fox-Strangways (1787-1858), who lived at Melbury House near Evershot, in west Dorset. Built in the 16th century, Melbury is a grand English country house with formal gardens, lakes and an extensive deer park. Lord Digby (1809-89) was Sir Edward St ...”

“... office. Both were by Emil Nolde. Brecher (1936) was a typically Noldean seascape, dark blue-green breakers against a glowing red sky. The other painting was less ominous: a garden picture from 1915, Blumengarten (Thersens Haus). Emil Nolde’s ‘Blumengarten (Thersens Haus)’ (1915). This and ‘Brecher’ (below) were the two paintings that hung ...”

“... also part of their appeal. Verrey’s in Regent Street was a place to see and be seen. It had dark green panels and small square tables with red-shaded candles. The ceiling had silver arches and there were so many mirrors on the walls that diners were reflected multiple times. One restaurant critic, Nathaniel Newnham-Davis, called it a ‘rendezvous of the ...”

“... its own system of beadles and watchmen charged with maintaining order and apprehending miscreants. Henry Fielding’s Bow Street Runners, the first detective force, were introduced in 1749, and individuals could employ private thief-takers (often former thieves) to catch criminals and put them before a magistrate, but it took the success – and commercial ...”

“... was variation in colour. Chemical compounds containing strontium burn red; copper carbonate adds green; iron filings make showers of golden sparkles.China’s appetite for novelty also led to chains of multiple ignitions and wooden dragons spitting fire. The 16th-century scholar Feng Ying Ching wrote about a kind of bomb from which sprang ground rats and ...”

“... a medium spoke in the presence of Mrs William James of a communication from a ‘Mary’ to Henry, the message was dutifully passed on to Henry James in England, who wrote that it was his ‘dear Mother’s unextinguished consciousness breaking through the interposing vastness of the universe and pouncing upon the ...”

“... on Whitman, including opera and painting, and about the influence of Whitman on others, including Henry James – who read Whitman, he told Edith Wharton, in ‘a mood of subdued ecstasy’ – and Hopkins, who wrote: ‘I always knew in my heart Walt Whitman’s mind to be more like my own than any man living.’ ‘Hopkins must have been ...”

“... Bryan Carsberg of Oftel smiles up in soft brown light as he dangles in the mirror on a green office wall. Michael Meyer of Emess Lighting is dissected by the blinds that cut across him and then reassembled from outside – his shirtsleeved figure looming like a target in the formulaic eye of some Hollywood assassin ...”

“... siphoned off to finance ‘security’. That audit reports were commissioned at all owes a lot to Henry Waxman, a Democrat and ranking minority member of the House of Representatives Committee on Government Reform. Waxman voted in favour of the invasion of Iraq. But since the war he’s been demanding that the Bush administration account for its cost. Within ...”

“... signifier for glamour; ‘the colour of the sea’ is meaningless – it can be grey, blue, brown, green. Powell delivers an image of indelible precision and detail. Conversation typically comes next as a marker. A quarter of A la recherche is made up of dialogue; a half of A Dance to the Music of Time. Speech in Proust is generally entertaining – it is ...”