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“... that includes President Eisenhower (who only reluctantly went on TV during his campaigns against a Stevenson who had a patrician disdain for it), President Kennedy (who won the election of 1960 thanks in part to the disastrous appearance of Nixon in the first of the televised debates), and finally Presidents Johnson and Nixon, both of whom were severely ...”

“... At the tail-end of 1892 Robert Louis Stevenson was working on a novel. The book was going well but one thing was bothering him. Serial publication, he felt, might be difficult to secure, since ‘The Justice Clerk’ – it would eventually be published as Weir of Hermiston – was both ‘queer’ and ‘pretty Scotch ...”

“... are interspersed with discussions of some of history’s ‘higher cribbers’: Borges, Montaigne, Stevenson, Eliot, Mann and Harold Bloom; Michel Tournier and Alain Robbe-Grillet; pretend pretenders to the throne, Perkin Warbeck and Lambert Simnel; Napoleon’s chef Dunand; and ‘the genitally preoccupied Roman epigrammatist Martial’. I found some of the ...”

“... 1970s from the confluence of the Iranian revolution, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Camp David Accords and the 1979 siege of Makkah. Like al-Qaida before it, IS sought the eventual destruction of the Saudi monarchy. But IS and the Sauds have things in common. Both were determined to act against apostasy and heresy; both insisted on the dangers of ...”

“... also sustains a passing bruise in Lord Archer of Sand-well’s entry on Lord Silkin. Sir Melford Stevenson was famous for stiff sentences, but according to Lord Roskill, ‘those who sat in the Court of Appeal in the Seventies might sometimes find in the appeal papers a letter from Stevenson to the court suggesting that he ...”

“... itself in many ways a grand pastiche: a de luxe effort of style. As Jan Morris and, more recently, David Cannadine have argued, the British elicited respect from their subjects abroad by spectacle as well as by force, exporting to their various dominions a home-grown instinct for pomp and ceremony, inflected with local colour to produce in each country a ...”

“... man with a backpack getting into a van. The van was being driven by a drug dealer called Oreese Stevenson; inside, they found $21,500 and half a kilo of cocaine. Jenkins took Stevenson’s keys and went to his house, where he found guns, more cocaine and bags of money. He didn’t have a search warrant. He called a ...”

“... to keep his own sons safe, it might have. By this time, he was living with his secretary Frances Stevenson in London while maintaining his marriage in Wales. Stevenson was devoted to him in the selfless way he required of all his women. She was many years younger than him but happily recorded in her diary how he had begged ...”

“... bore – he is so insistent as to be a positive fatigue.’ This tart commentary was provided by David Alexander Edward Lindsay, better-known (after he succeeded his father in 1913) as the 27th Earl of Crawford, and probably best-known as the tenth Earl of Balcarres, a junior title that did not bar him from the House of Commons. To unravel his pedigree, as ...”

“... in every sense and whatever its troubles, to Seamus Heaney. Some writers – Joyce, Milosz, Stevenson – have to stand well back from the native canvas in order to see the composition, but others dwell inside the painting, loving the paint, the smell of oils and the fine smear of themselves. This new book – written ‘for both with love’ – is ...”

“... United Kingdom, Madagascar) and archipelagic states (Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines). David Bosco opens his account of ocean governance with the question of the Senkaku Islands, eight uninhabited rocks between Taiwan and Okinawa which are in themselves no good to anyone but are nonetheless bitterly contested. Under US occupation from 1945, when ...”

“... literature: ‘effects-based operations’ were defined by the former US air force general David Deptula during the First Gulf War as a means of applying the minimum conventional force to achieve the greatest strategic effect. In US government planning, ‘proxy warfare’ is the preserve of wily enemies, Iran and Russia in particular. The US National ...”

“... abuses, let alone the Rabaa massacre or the mass imprisonment and torture of dissidents. When David Cameron held a meeting with Sisi in New York in September he spoke of ‘Egypt’s pivotal role in the region’ and its importance to British policy. ‘Both economically and in the fight against Islamist extremism’, he said, Egypt was a crucial ally and ...”

“... atolls had contributed to a widespread scepticism about the bomb. In 1984, the new prime minister, David Lange, announced that he would make the country a nuclear-free zone – a policy hated by the US but popular, then as now, in New Zealand. When New Zealand began to refuse permission for nuclear-powered ships to enter its ports, the US suspended New Zealand ...”

“... that he had had an experienced mentor to call on for advice – someone such as Robert Louis Stevenson, who ‘had always seemed to me “one of the family”’. Greene was distantly related to RLS through his mother’s cousin. ‘Names which appeared in his Collected Letters were photographs in our family album. In the nursery we played on the ...”