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“... when the Sunday Correspondent invited me to be its American contributor, Black, or someone with a North American accent calling himself Conrad Black, was on the telephone within hours of my being gazetted, barking that I was a disgrace to the profession and should not be employed. Indeed he made the very damaging accusation that I was ‘a mental case’. A ...”

“... The intention was to find a practical means of honouring his work. I was taken to a tiny North London council flat, and there sitting in the middle of its cramped living-room, I encountered a very ancient and frail-looking man, striking mainly for the large and antique ear-trumpet which he applied when straining to catch remarks addressed to him. I ...”

“... in 1603: Scotland perhaps illustrates the proposition that there was such a thing as a ‘North Sea economy’. At a time when waterborne trade was so conspicuously easier than land-borne trade, this is probably what should have been expected. The thought prompts the reflection that the improvements in road transport characteristic of the 17th century ...”

“... a wet Friday morning and we have come over on the hovercraft and are driving through St Omer and north to Zillebeke, a village south-east of Ypres, or, since we have now crossed the Belgian frontier, Ieper. The guidebook says there were three battles at Ypres. The first, in 1914, ended in stalemate and marked the beginning of trench warfare. The second, in ...”

“... first indication that the Telegraph is preparing to turn its attention to the Tories. First up, Oliver Letwin, who apparently claimed £2000 to install a drainage pipe under his tennis court. As the BBC’s Nick Robinson remarked, ‘the political class has lost control of this story. No one knows where it’s going.’ 11 May. To Westminster. Entire place ...”

“... Oliver Craske​ begins his biography of Ravi Shankar by telling an Indian parable. A blind man, stroking an elephant’s trunk, thinks he is holding a snake. Another blind man, running his hands along the animal’s leg, assumes he is touching a tree trunk; a third mistakes its tail for a rope. People’s response to Indian classical music is the same, Shankar told a press conference in London in 1966 ...”

“... touch and go. There was some gratifying recognition, especially in the industrial cities of the North, where Brown always found acceptance easier to come by than in London. Jesus Washing Peter’s feet, a meditative picture which fuses Christian doctrine with Brown’s idiosyncratic socialism, won a prize of £50 in Liverpool. Thomas Plint of Leeds ...”

“... produce images revised for a new political moment. Pierre Lombart issued an engraving in 1655 of Oliver Cromwell, splendid in armour on horseback. Times changed. The head was removed and replaced with Louis XIV’s; then the head was switched back to Cromwell’s, then to Charles I’s, and finally – collectors now interested in the fluctuations of ...”

“... march – swastikas flying – through a Jewish neighbourhood in Skokie, Illinois (a village just north of Chicago), where many Holocaust survivors lived. Faced with the prospect of a Nazi march, the Skokie village board had passed ordinances banning parades with military-style uniforms, banning the distribution of pamphlets promoting the hatred of any group ...”

“... notes, which are scattered, in what must often be inconvenient forms, in libraries in England and North America, is a singular accomplishment. There is no danger that Sharpe has made Drake seem less interesting than he is. How interesting is he? Sharpe is impressed not only by the extent of his commentaries, which, though far from unusual in form, may be ...”

“... and all-round plausibility, The Emperor of Ocean Park lies somewhere south of John Grisham and north of Nancy Drew. It is long-winded, shoddily put together and riddled with repetitions and small inconsistencies: characters are introduced twice, facts stated and restated as if for the first time; a pool table appears mid-scene (as if from an earlier ...”

“... Foucault, Althusser, Lyotard – have all had experience of client societies, either in French North Africa or Soviet-ruled Bulgaria, and are out to unmask the Real Thing as a sham. Nick Groom’s book is clearly influenced by some of this thought; but like the counterfeiter it is not exactly out to trumpet its indebtedness, thus appearing rather less of a ...”

“... as in the case of George IV and his giraffe, which was captured as a calf in Sudan and sent north to Khartoum trussed up on the back of a camel. From there she was sent by boat to Cairo, on to Malta and then to England, where she arrived in June 1827 and was taken to Windsor. The king had her fed on a supposedly nourishing diet of milk, ordered a warm ...”

“... through the Cabinet Office? Was it also a mistake to give the new permanent secretary at DExEU, Oliver Robbins, an additional role as a ‘sherpa’, an advance man for the upcoming negotiations with Brussels and the EU 27, reporting back directly not to his own secretary of state, David Davis, but to the prime minister? The magnitude of Brexit is daunting ...”

“... involves placing Asia and the rising sun at the top and disregarding the compass point of the North. Once in India, Roe had to quickly reconsider the likelihood of England’s being feared as ‘a terror to all nations’. The Mughal emperor ruled around a hundred million people. A few years earlier, an EIC merchant called William Hawkins had fairly ...”