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“... Slessor’s good works on the Upper Niger still earn her an image on Scottish banknotes, while David Livingstone became the world’s best-known Scotsman. They did not save many souls. After 50 years’ work in India, the missions could show only 3359 converts. But their influence on empire was deep and paradoxical, at once the advance guard of colonialism ...”

“... among them the Nazi-nostalgic François Genoud, Himmler’s masseur Felix Kersten and the young David Irving – to whom he initially gave more trust than they deserved. As Colin Kidd has suggested, Trevor-Roper had a curious weakness for con men. He found them fascinating. But he overestimated his own ability to see through them, and underestimated the ...”

“... to touch the ground, as one meeting followed another in Berlin, Paris, Moscow, Washington, Camp David and Ottawa. As Sarotte says, the tempo was at times ‘unimaginable’. At the Ottawa conference in February 1990, which was supposed to be about aviation, Baker ‘managed in just one day … to speak at least five times each to both Genscher and ...”

“... road romance throughout the Beat legend. Tangled up in the story, as usual, is the Beat Lancelot, Neal Cassady. ‘The new American hero ... delinquent and hungry for a purpose’, Cassady shows up here in 1947, a beguiling apparition, naked with an erection in a tenement doorway, waiting to be ‘miraculously crafted’ into a figure of romance. For ...”

“... David Mitchell’s first book, Ghostwritten (1999), which describes itself as ‘a novel in nine parts’, is a collection of loosely interconnected stories. The protagonist of one will have a walk-on role in the next; a minor character from someone else’s story will later reappear as the narrator of their own. The first narrator is a member of a Japanese doomsday cult, the perpetrator of a poison gas attack on the Tokyo subway, now on the run in Okinawa ...”

“... can be tolerated, and might even be enjoyed, as piano-players in the funhouse of letters. Early in David Plante’s diaries, we find him tinkling away, dropping names in basso profundo, as if knowing people and knowing what they do in private can be the thing that makes one special. He is 28 years old when he comes to London from the US (a little younger than ...”

“... and behind it lay the struggle of a very rich man to do good. In his role as owner-editor, David Astor had more freedom than any other journalist in London, but power made him bashful and uneasy. When, towards the end of Astor’s editing career, the South African journalist Donald Woods proposed a series of interviews with him, Astor suggested that ...”

“... horse. Take England itself, uner attack from false prophets like Hobsbawm – or ‘the journalist Neal Ascherson’, known to be forever sneering about the ‘Druids’ of the Ancien Régime and its élite values. Dancing on the grave of Old England, retorts Selbourne, ‘is a serious matter’. It might summon up plebeian demons, and Jews as well as crusty ...”

“... secession war in 1993 (another $600,000 was intercepted before he could pay it into his account). David Mirtskhulava, the former minister of energy, had a mild heart attack when he was charged with pocketing $6 million on its way to pay Georgia’s bill for electricity imports. Georgia is not a sprawling continent, but a poor, steep country about the same ...”

“... and shits in America’. The group included Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Lucien Carr and David Kammerer. In August 1944, Carr stabbed and killed Kammerer. Near the end of And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, a lightly fictionalised and surprisingly engaging account of the murder and of the months leading up to it, written in 1945 by Kerouac and ...”

“... of the people who figure in Jackson’s book were buzzing about the Sillars camp. Two of them – Neal Ascherson and Tom Nairn – are very familiar to readers of this paper. Another, the economist George Kerevan, a former member of the International Marxist Group and then a Labour councillor, went on to become an influential nationalist commentator with ...”

“... of Dieter in Dog Soldiers is in part based on the Kesey of Acid Test, and Hicks is modelled on Neal Cassady, the link between the old-style Beat life and the new hippy movement. These kinds of dislocation, transposition and cannibalisation of personal experience are, of course, not only permissible in a novel: they are the reasons for the novel’s ...”

“... cent, and fell in Yorkshire and the Humber by 8 per cent between 2010 and 2014. Lord Young, now David Cameron’s ‘enterprise tsar’, had to resign in late 2010 after suggesting that people ‘have never had it so good’.It was only after substantial Tory losses in the North at the 2014 European elections that George Osborne launched a regional ...”

“... re-election of his government, and that is certainly unacceptable to journalists of the centre. Neal Ascherson, happy to describe himself as a middle-of-the-road warmonger of the sort attacked by Foot, gracefully admitted that Foot has often been right in the past – which is something that should be said at the outset. He has had a very good eye for ...”

“... at the gates of the Kremlin, claiming to be the personal emissary of the British prime minister, David Lloyd George, and demanding an audience with Lenin. He was persuasive enough to be let in and managed to talk his way as far as the chairman’s secretary, if not all the way to Lenin himself. Wary Bolshevik officials summoned the newly appointed British ...”