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“... from him. In 1739 she left England for Italy, hoping that her love for Francesco Algarotti, a young Italian, would result in a long and comfortable liaison. But her lover proved cold, and Lady Mary was left to enjoy Italy by herself. She never totally broke with her husband, and they maintained the fiction that she was travelling abroad for her ...”

“... quantity has found its way to the West to merit a compact but lavishly illustrated history from Robert Fisher, a grasp of the current situation needs more explicit testimony than even these powerful images provide. It is obvious from Warren Smith’s marathon retelling of the tangled tale of Tibet and its longstanding relationship with China that things may ...”

“... them, look after the elderly, remember you are nothing, and keep the cheapskates at bay.When I was young, I had a thing for the after-places, which didn’t have patrons, or, heaven forfend, members, but habitués. There were a few Chinese restaurants in Gerrard Street which had shebeens in the back. You had to drink and not fight – these were the only rules ...”

“... 1919. He was only 29 years old, still dazzling, animal-like, an Aschenbach vision on the Lido, a young man who could jump and pause in the air: but he began to spend all night in his studio scribbling the same things over and over, the doodlings of the incrementally mad. The thing he drew was eyes. Sometimes, in his little exercise books, he might draw ...”

“... right-wing. Both authors write of their profound respect for one of their former bosses, George K. Young. Young, who died recently, was deputy head of MI6 until he joined the merchant bankers Kleinwort Benson in 1961. One of the very few revelations in George Blake’s book is a memorandum which George ...”

“... partying which has informed ‘standard accounts’ of the so-called Jazz Age, crammed with bright young things enjoying a hop and a skip before the Wall Street Crash of 1929. His suggestion is that the times were more political: less cocaine, more coal-face; less hangover, more pit-closure. The defining moment, he argues, was not the Crash, but the General ...”

“... acted as a zealous servant of the Germans: he connived, for instance, in the transportation of young French men and women to forced labour beyond the Rhine. On the other hand, his homosexuality is judged less severely nowadays than was the case forty years ago. A comic note is struck by Bonnard’s typically French obsession with the proper conduct of ...”

“... As a young soldier in Germany at the end of the war I was dropped head first into two manifestations of the Third Reich which half a century later continue to exert a peculiar fascination. After two months in what became the Russian occupied zone, the field company to which I belonged was moved back to the Harz Mountains area ...”

“... had introduced Cannadine and Cannadine had given us an encouragingly comical puff for his book, Robert Rhodes James reminded us that Lloyd George, despite doing so much to reduce the Upper House to impotence and discredit, had ended his days as Earl Lloyd George of Dwyfor, and then led us off down miles of corridors to a cellar under St Stephen’s Hall ...”

“... the celebrated ‘Lessons of the War’, both at once. I first met him in 1965, in the office of Robert Heilman, then the benevolent but firm head of the English Department at the University of Washington in Seattle. Calling to present my credentials, I walked into a row; Heilman benevolently firm, Reed furious, licensed to be furious. He was in Seattle as a ...”

“... that, I left abruptly, an unsuccessful mission. Actually, I had some slight conversation. One young man, not even born when the meeting of 1958 had taken place, asked what answer I had to Mrs Thatcher’s remark that if Hitler had had an atomic bomb he would have used it. What had CND to say to that? To judge from Hitler’s usual behaviour, Hitler would ...”

“... almost painfully joyful about the efforts of these often desperately poor and short-lived young men to make new art in a philistine country, an art that wasn’t epigonal or merely watered-down Impressionism – as one of the rooms in the exhibition puts it, towards a ‘European avant-garde’ (in a European arrière-pays, I suppose). Marc and Macke ...”

“... perhaps the most popular semi-autonomous institution in the state: the ‘people’s team’, as Robert Edelman calls it in this revealing and often funny microhistory. Thanks partly to the Starostins’ imprisonment, Spartak gained an aura of independence that still persists. For many, supporting the club was a small way of saying ‘no’ to the ...”

“... Waltz), the head of Spectre and by coincidence both the son and the murderer of a man who took the young Bond under his wing. Oberhauser is operating a contraption that threatens to deprive Bond of his facial recognition abilities by driving a pair of pins into the sides of his skull – a painful operation in its initial stages, as indicated by Craig’s ...”

“... the money to get in with the disorganised semi-aristocratic opposition to the Whigs, like a Bright Young Thing bribing his way into the Chelsea Arts Club to get his picture in the Tatler. It was a very un-Byronic ambition. In terms of romantic identities, though, of imitations and of stylisations, the career of the ...”