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“... Colonel Gaddafi is building the largest aqueduct the world has ever seen. The Great Man-Made River supplies the cities of northern Libya with drinking water from beneath the sands of the south. Pumping stations at Tazerbo and Sarir in the eastern Libyan Sahara raise water from deep aquifers and convey it northwards to Benghazi and Sirt through 1500 km of pipeline ...”

“... enabled people to be on time, whereas mobile phones mean it hardly ever matters if we’re late. Andrew Wilson, a poet, will be publishing his first collection, Text Messages, in the autumn (Smith/Doorstop, £5). Readers are encouraged to send poems to friends’ mobiles. From September, it will be possible to receive five free by texting yes to 07781 ...”

“... and travel sanctions, then moved to cautious engagement: neither strategy made an impact. Andrew Wilson is more dispassionate than Brian Bennett, who was the UK ambassador in Minsk between 2003 and 2007 and remains angry at what he saw. Wilson devotes the first half of his book to an analysis of Belarusian ...”

“... the columns of journals, at university conferences, and at public and private meetings ever since. Andrew Wilson had already written an effective narrative of the 2004 uprising in Ukraine’s Orange Revolution (2005), where he acknowledged that the protests against Yanukovich’s fraudulent 2004 election were pre-planned (exit polls, steward training, the ...”

“... held for Gilles Deleuze (a ‘Christ among philosophers’). I learned a lot about her from Andrew Wilson’s biography, a book which strikes the right balance between empathy and critical distance. Wilson’s interpretations of her work, however, are often vapid. Can one really take seriously remarks such ...”

“... the lost age of innocence. Walter Lord, who wrote the 1955 classic A Night to Remember, which, as Andrew Wilson says in his wonderful retellings of survivors’ stories, marks the beginning of the modern era of Titanic myth and memory, sailed on her as a boy. (The Olympic had her share of bad luck too. She was rammed by a warship in 1911 and limped into ...”

“... troubled – took the credit here where it wasn’t entirely due. Her doughty British biographer Andrew Wilson was the first to report that Margot Johnson, Highsmith’s New York agent, had actually engineered the upbeat dénouement, just as the book was on the verge of publication (Johnson thought – correctly – it might improve sales). ...”

“... as MI5 and MI6 had to be kept so secret; MI5 remained officially secret for 80 years. Christopher Andrew has another explanation, however. It was just a ‘taboo’, he writes (quoting the historian Michael Howard), like ‘intra-marital sex’. Everyone knew it went on, and was ‘quite content that it should, but to speak, write or ask questions about ...”

“... All the shops​ on my university campus have gone cashless. The vendors at our farmers’ market use little card readers that plug into their phones. We use cash very little these days and coins even less. By recent historical standards this is an aberration. Since the 1850s and 1860s, when banknotes were standardised in Britain and the United States respectively, most people, most of the time, have thought of money in terms of coins and paper banknotes, marked with numbers to indicate their value in relation to one another and to the goods and services for which they can be exchanged ...”

“... au Magistrat’, though without saying where or when. I am grateful to the sharp eyes of Andrew Wilson, who spotted the Mountjoy reference by chance (or by alphabetical serendipity: he was researching a family ancestor called Merryweather) and kindly shared it with me. The story, such as it can be reconstructed, is contained in two sets of court ...”

“... There has​ never been a bad time to reappraise Harold Wilson. He was a politician so enigmatic, so elusive even to his own associates, that he seemed to demand near continuous reappraisal throughout his career. On the verge of office in 1964, he appeared to more than one observer as a latter-day Lloyd George, a radical tribune sprung from provincial nonconformity to drive the nation before him with wit and moral exhortation ...”

“... rearmament with an admixture of militarism – which put him at odds with President Woodrow Wilson, who didn’t want the United States embroiling itself in European quarrels, didn’t see any need for a bigger army, and above all didn’t take kindly to generals mucking around in politics. By 1917, when Wilson’s ...”

“... Joe? Certainly, the Civil War had given Hemingway a soft spot for communist saboteurs – Edmund Wilson had swatted him as ‘the Hotel Florida Stalinist’ – but it also reconciled him to a few anti-fascist power brokers at home, such as the treasury secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr, for whom Hemingway agreed to ‘look into’ the Chinese during a trip to ...”

“... 1966, when she was 19, the knicker-throwing debutante met a 27-year-old lieutenant in the Guards, Andrew Parker Bowles. He was handsome, and his parents were ‘excellent in-law material’. His father, Derek, a steward at Newbury racecourse, was a great friend of the Queen Mother’s, while his mother, Ann (nicknamed ‘Rhino’), was the Chief Commissioner ...”

“... an abuse of power to deploy the royal prerogative to supplant the authority of Parliament? Lord Wilson at one point spoke for the Roundheads. ‘This phrase “from time to time”,’ he asked, ‘is that simply talking about changes in European law, changes from time to time in European law, or do you say that the phrase also encompasses rights being ...”