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“... to the Duke of Kent, the Grand Master of the Most Distinguished Order of St Michael and St George, that Philby be made a Companion of the Order. This was usually conferred upon British subjects as a reward for services abroad and often went to members of the foreign service. The Russians took such matters as honours and medals almost as seriously as ...”

“... and primary function of all intelligence agencies – to ‘covert action’. By the end of Allen Dulles’s term as DCI (1953-61), the ascendancy of covert action over intelligence analysis was so great that the CIA’s own analysts were not consulted in planning the invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs. Since Watergate, the emphasis has shifted firmly ...”

“... couple were denied seats on the plane that would have taken them across the Atlantic to safety? George Kates, an IDC agent working in China, reflected later in the war that ‘much of this general plan for omnivorous and utopian book gathering … is on paper, and has no great bearing on the winning of the war.’As the conflict moved back into Europe, the ...”

“... his enormous posthumous Collected won America’s National Book Award for 1971; its editor, Donald Allen, has since brought out a Selected and several more volumes of prose and verse. During the 1950s, O’Hara reviewed art and contemporary classical music. He wrote at least seven poems called ‘On Rachmaninoff’s Birthday’, and many others in which music ...”

“... they opened up. A whole gallery of male heroes was assembled from decades past: Michael Caine, George Best, Keith Moon, Steve McQueen. Some of them I’d barely heard of and some were dead (or very nearly), but I was left in no doubt that a proper lad would be a fan of these geezers. Undoubtedly Loaded – along with Arena, Esquire, GQ, FHM, Maxim (to name ...”

“... Christopher Cox, Robert Ferro, Michael Grumley, Andrew Holleran, Felice Picano, Edmund White and George Whitmore, together with the film critic Vito Russo and the editor and academic George Stambolian – began producing books whose examination of gay life, though often programmatic, was still infused with the raw ...”

“... of mental imbalance and upset which became so fashionable in the 1720s and 1730s, and which George Cheyne christened ‘the English malady’. For sufferer as for healer, an organic condition was a real condition, not a mere maladie imaginaire. Moreover, as long as, ‘ “superstitious” causes and “magical” cures still had their popular ...”

“... now:/a faintest glimmer I am going to get out/somehow alive from this’); a sequence called ‘To Allen Tate’ quotes from a letter by Tate; ‘Publication Day’ is a letter from Marcia Nardi rewritten as a sonnet.Hardwick felt a certain schadenfreude that the poems were, in her opinion, so bad. ‘It seemed so sad that the work was, certainly in that part ...”

“... two Corinne Day photographs (one of Kate again) and some earlier monochrome prints, including George Hoyningen-Huene’s 1930 Modern Mariners Put out to Sea, of two androgynous swimmers on a diving board, the old Penguin Classics cover for The Great Gatsby. The far end of this group is presided over by Alexander McQueen, in a huge image blown up to fill a ...”

“... has traditionally been mocked (even by critics now as prehistoric-looking themselves as Walter Allen) as the epitome of middlebrow philistinism – on a par with the Janeite who reads Austen every year to relish her ‘wit’. This, however, is the company Wall prefers. Wall takes it for granted that Trollope must be swallowed as the boa takes the buffalo ...”

“... taken upstairs by Henry James Sr to bless his three-month-old son William. It was, as Gay Wilson Allen remarks in his biography of James, ‘a prophetic event for the future philosopher of Pragmatism’.) ‘shakespeare,’ Emerson says, ‘will never be made by the study of Shakespeare,’ and he warns on another occasion that ‘meek young men grow up in ...”

“... stage of her adult life: they also provide a running commentary on her times. She is a witness to George III’s derangement in 1788, sequestered with him and the Queen in the Palace at Kew. She attends the trial of Warren Hastings. She experiences the Napoleonic regime first-hand during an enforced stay in France between 1803 and 1812. In her teens and ...”

“... of the relevant documents, including diaries to which an earlier biographer of William, Gay Wilson Allen, still had access. Some of the destruction may have been intended to conceal signs of friction in the marriage: for all his gratitude to Alice, William seems to have been an inveterate womaniser, whose lifelong habit of ‘falling in love with every girl I ...”

“... big Soviet troop reductions in East-Central Europe. Early in 1989, the new American president, George H.W. Bush, still assumed that Gorbachev was ‘too good to be true’. General Scowcroft, his national security adviser, suggested he was ‘potentially more dangerous than his predecessors’. Dick Cheney, then the secretary of defense, was half-right for ...”

“... who could beat a pair of tailors in making any garment a ‘gentleman’ might wear. The Labour MP George Edwards recalled in his autobiography, From Crow-Scaring to Westminster, that in the mid-19th century, he had ‘known my mother to be at the loom 16 hours out of the 24, and for these long hours she would not average more than 4s a week, and very often ...”