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“... aggressive teenage cynicism is expertly caught (and translated into English teenage jargon, by Gerald Turner); it can be very amusing. Finally there is Jan, a young man who has admired Kristýna since the time when he was her husband’s pupil and saw her waiting with Jana’s pram outside his school. When he happens to catch sight of her again 15 ...”

“... During the academic year 1982-83 Alain Besançon, a French specialist on Soviet affairs, became a visiting professor at the Hoover Institute in Stanford. He arranged with his Parisian colleague, Jean Plumyene, that they would write regularly to each other and that their correspondence would be published. The interest of this exchange of letters between French academics, the one in California and the other in Paris, lies in Besançon’s reactions to America ...”

“... of which Jack London was a mainstay. Briefly on the strength were P.G. Wodehouse and Hugh Walpole. Gerald Mills was an intellectual who put up most of the money; it is his fate to become universally and perhaps immortally identified with a branch of literature which was hardly his first choice, but such is publishing. Charles Boon, a brewery worker’s son who ...”

“... what the D-Day troops were spared. He approves the ‘abrasive and brilliant’ Field-Marshal Sir Gerald Templer, who apparently once told Monty: ‘You think you are going down in history as the victor of Alamein. But it will be for your re-raising of morale, together with Churchill, that you will be chiefly remembered – not Alamein.’ Templer may well be ...”

“... about high society. Ashamed of her spelling, she insisted on reading one of them to her publisher, Gerald Duckworth, in his office. At his suggestion they broke for lunch at the Savoy. No sympathy need be wasted on Duckworth, who was on to a good thing. Three Weeks, the succès de scandale of his 1907 list, stemmed from a liaison Mrs Glyn had been enjoying ...”

“... unaware that his Decline and Fall is a chained book in the lavatory. Poets of the day include Gerald Gould, who in a forgotten sonnet urged his contemporaries ‘For God’s sake, if you sin, take pleasure in it.’ Humbert Wolfe scribbles a tribute to the Spreadeagle, commending ‘the cool antarctic thrill/Of great Queen Anne in Fothergill’. A ...”

“... has been more a chaos of archives than of mind. After the Second World War, the younger composer Gerald Finzi began amalgamating scattered collections – made by Marion Scott, the Gurney family, Ivor’s Gloucester friend John Haines, Vaughan Williams and others – into a central archive. The process continued after Finzi’s death in 1956. Neither Gurney ...”

“... normally strong sympathy with early epic stopped at Saxon romance with the remark that ‘Mr Turner has given us the abridgment of one entitled Caedmon, in which the hero ... encounters, defeats, and finally slays an evil being called Grendel’. It’s barely credible! He’d never have got away with it if he’d been writing about some Owen or ...”

“... Prestwich’s broad canvas, that we approach the kernel of Protestant experience. Wallington was a turner – a maker of wooden articles on lathes – who lived his long and in worldly terms not especially successful life in the small parish of St Leonard’s East-cheap by London Bridge. Even by Puritan standards he was an obsessive recorder. He wrote at least ...”

“... an enthusiastic but erratic driver who had recently caused an accident in which her married lover Gerald O’Donovan was badly injured, careered around in her ambulance with the potential for doing more harm than good. The comedy of it was caught with cruel economy by Waugh in the opening of Officers and Gentlemen. It is a scene Feigel might have quoted at ...”

“... and recorded from close hand the eruption of Tambora in 1815 (the debris from which furnished Turner with his finest sunsets), as well as founding Singapore. The zoo he conceived was finally opened in 1828 but Raffles never saw it: he had died from a cerebral haemorrhage in 1826, aged 45. With Raffles gone, the early ZSL members could not agree what their ...”

“... one side of Obama runs a growing populist opposition to bailing out any more big companies,’ Gerald Seib wrote in the Wall Street Journal. ‘On the other side runs an equally powerful desire to stop a generation-long haemorrhaging of manufacturing jobs … Facing this quandary, Obama has chosen to deliver a dramatic dose of tough love’ by insisting ...”

“... was obliged to report them. Nixon was finally forced to resign in August 1974. His successor, Gerald Ford, made Nelson Rockefeller, a reliable intelligence insider, his vice president, and asked him to produce a report on the CIA’s alleged historical abuses.Rockefeller’s report was issued in June 1975. For the most part it was vague and ...”

“... August, another attack, never substantiated, was supposedly made on Maddox and a sister-ship, USS Turner Joy, in a fierce storm. On 5 August, 64 US Navy aircraft bombed Vinh, north of the demarcation line between the two Vietnams – the first of eight years of increasingly heavy raids. On 7 August, the US Congress passed by 504-2 a resolution authorising ...”