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“... and veterans, creating a visible military presence at many screenings; attracted German children, by the hundreds of thousands, to nationwide Hitler Youth Film Hours (frequently showcasing militarist films, and often scheduled to pre-empt church attendance); encouraged the display of Nazi memorabilia and busts of Hitler in cinema lobbies; and mandated the ...”

“... and telescopic views of reality. Tolstoy went on to say that ‘a new form of writing will be necessary’ because the ‘swift’ scene changes on film were more effective than the ‘heavy, long-drawn-out kind of writing to which we are accustomed’. In The Tenth Muse, Laura Marcus gives a lively account of the impact of moving images on a wide ...”

“... before the Senate intelligence committee. ‘Lordy,’ he said, ‘I hope there are tapes.’ David Grann couldn’t have known, when he began work on his absorbing, infuriating book about the crimes that helped shape the FBI, how many Americans would be looking to the agency today for salvation from their country’s ...”

“... region. From 1912, access to the world’s first official police forensic laboratory was gained by entering through a back door and climbing three flights of creaking stairs to the attic. Edmond Locard, who founded the laboratory, is credited with the idea that ‘every contact leaves a trace’ (modern forensic scientists refer to this as Locard’s ...”

“... particular intensity around the question of what people might want to do, and what they should be permitted to do, in their sexual relations. For anyone who thinks that the Bible gives clear directions about this, or that there has been any consistency in the attitudes of the Church, Diarmaid MacCulloch’s Lower than the Angels will come as a ...”

“... out as a vaccination centre. Though neither of us knows quite where it is, we realise we must be getting close from the number of eighty-year-olds and carers making their way off the Kentish Town Road, all on the same errand. Rupert isn’t allowed in, and I go fairly briskly through a series of waiting rooms before reaching the vaccination room. It’s ...”

“... July 1853, eighty thousand Russian troops crossed the River Pruth and invaded the Ottoman Empire. By 15 July they had occupied Bucharest, the capital of Ottoman Wallachia, as well as its other major towns. It was an unprovoked attack, justified on spurious grounds: Tsar Nicholas I claimed that more than ten million Orthodox Christians were imperilled ...”

“... homosexuality’. And nobody was more worried than the federal government, which was rumoured to be teeming with gays and lesbians. One might think that Washington’s attentions would have been focused elsewhere – on the Soviet Union, for example, or on Communist spies – but in 1950, President Truman’s advisers warned him that ‘the country is more ...”

“... David Solkin​ ’s new book is designed to replace Painting in Britain 1530-1790, a volume of the Pelican history of art by Ellis Waterhouse, which was first published in 1953 and appeared in five separate editions, the last in 1994, nine years after Waterhouse’s death. Waterhouse’s history was quickly recognised as a classic ...”

“... government would provide accurate information about the pandemic. But public trust soon declined. By the start of June, only half of those polled thought they were being told the truth. News of Dominic Cummings’s lockdown jaunt to Durham had been preceded by a chaotic change of message. (Levido and Guerin were reported to ...”

“... Neil wrote, ‘but if you don’t understand what really makes the Spectator tick then they will be as naught’ (the two had fallen out when Neil jumped ship from Marshall’s right-wing TV channel, GB News). The next day, Marshall visited the Spectator offices – just a few doors down from the offices of UnHerd, an online publication he also owns – and ...”

“... his whims. After seeing Rodin’s The Kiss in 1900, he was determined to have a replica carved by the sculptor himself. It was to be exact in every respect except one. He asked Rodin to provide a full view of the nude man’s genitals. Four years later the piece was completed and delivered to its new owner. But Warren ...”

“... time Baring was the author of some sixty books, and had a collected edition of his works published by Heinemann in the Thirties, he is probably known to most people only through this gloss. Born in 1874, the eighth child of Ned Baring, first Lord Revelstoke and head of the Baring Brothers bank, Maurice had an idyllic childhood, spent mainly at Membland, the ...”

“... letters they sent home to mothers, fathers and brothers, mostly in the Punjab, are anything to go by. Similar letters home, sent by British soldiers to Surrey or Wolverhampton or Newcastle, were, it is true, mostly composed in the same vein: it was considered almost a military duty to sound cheery, and to conceal the real ...”

“... news when they bombed Baghdad. I have been thinking about it because, this morning, I was woken by the sound of a pneumatic drill. When I looked out, there was a film crew on the street, two floors down. And when I switched on the radio they were bombing Yugoslavia, not Belgrade, but somewhere out of sight (though it is hard to tell from the radio). They ...”