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“... and drawn fighters from across Africa to join them. They have also recruited local youths, some as young as 14. Those rallying under the Islamist banner don’t necessarily share the same agenda. Some are cocaine traffickers seeking new partners and protection. Others hope to get a piece of the million-dollar ransoms collected from Europeans kidnapped in the ...”

“... being involved in a male brothel scandal, and a close friend of his Cambridge tutor, James Kenneth Stephen, a cousin of Virginia Woolf, who fasted to death in an asylum after Eddy died. Is that all the scandal, then? Well no, not quite. Eddy died in 1892 only weeks after he became engaged to Princess May (as the future queen was then known). We are invited to ...”

“... by a manuscript illustration of boys skating and sledging, represent the environment in which the young Becket grew up, but we’re given little sense of the city itself with its diverse population of recent immigrants, foreign merchants, and its notable Jewish community. The young Becket was proud of his roots. An example ...”

“... When​ my grandfather died of a heart attack in 1927, he was the father of three young children and did not know that a fourth child, my mother, was on the way. This strangeness – the growth of a baby after the death of its parent – was both tragic and miraculous. It made my mother feel odd about her existence, I think, which is not the same as feeling odd about herself ...”

“... of his favourites. It shows the top storeys of two houses with an upper porch and two figures, a young and an older woman. I don’t think there was really any idea of symbolism in the two figures. There might have been vaguely; certainly not obsessively so. I was more interested in the sunlight on buildings and on the figures than in any symbolism. Jo posed ...”

“... she had married a monk, not a king’. Louis had in fact been raised in a monastery. The cleric Stephen of Paris agreed that he ‘was entirely ecclesiastical in his conversation and habits’, though from him that was high praise.Louis’s monkish tendencies became all too apparent during the disastrous Second Crusade of 1147-49. Eleanor herself had taken ...”

“... a ramshackle household in St John’s Wood. Elizabeth Jane Howard, who knew them all when she was young and later wove them into her Cazalet novels, described the Craxtons as exuding happiness like pollen, which rubbed off. The pianist Harold Isaacs remembered overcrowded Acomb Lodge as ‘a very strange house’, adding enigmatically: ‘Essie knitted ...”

“... thanked me a thousand times’). Then there is the splendid book edited by Richard van Emden and Stephen Chambers, which consists mainly of soldiers’ and sailors’ letters and diaries, British, Anzac and Turkish – no French or Indian, apart from a couple of Indian officers in the British army – arranged chronologically, with an editorial commentary ...”

“... sociologist thinks that tells us anything about mobility, though some economists do. Among them is Stephen Machin, whose Social Mobility and Its Enemies (co-authored with Lee Elliot Major) likens absolute social mobility to a caravan progressing across a desert. But that’s confusing: higher levels of social mobility may be a means to faster growth, but ...”

“... belated reaction to mass killings in Bosnia, where she worked in the early 1990s as a young freelance reporter. She was understandably appalled by what happened after the carnage began in 1992: ‘Despite unprecedented public outcry about foreign brutality, for the next three and a half years the United States, Europe and the United Nations stood ...”

“... the ordinary citizen’s contact with the police. The second was an intensive study of a group of young blacks whose attitudes were governed by the belief that they were under threat from the institutions of a predominantly white society. Third came a survey of 1770 police officers up to inspector rank, illustrating the deployment and activity of London ...”

“... chair, riddled with bullets; the other was kneeling, shot through the head. They were Derrick Moo Young, aged 53, and his son Duane Moo Young, 23, businessmen from Jamaica who had looked after properties in Fort Lauderdale owned by the man who would be accused of killing them, Krishna Maharaj, a Trinidadian national and ...”

“... a photograph in Harper’s Bazaar and mentioned it to Howard. The image was of a smartly dressed young woman standing outside the door to a blood bank – it had a slightly vampiric quality. This was the start of what would be called ‘the Look’. The young woman was Betty Joan Perske, born in the Bronx in September ...”

“... comes up everywhere in his fiction. One of his short stories, ‘The Darling’, is about a pretty young thing whom no man can resist. Her father is one such and has his incestuous brains splattered over the kitchen table with his own Walther-P38 (it ‘virtually ruined the checkered tablecloth’, the narrative primly notes). Dolores then goes upstate to San ...”

“... begins. New York. K. wants to make a seafood salad, so we go into a fishmonger’s on Bleeker. A young, fat guy sits by the door, an old grey one at the back and, doing all the work, a Puerto Rican. K.: I want a dozen mussels. Fat Guy: We don’t sell them by the dozen. K.: How do you sell them? Fat Guy: Sell them by the pound. K.: OK. A pound. (Pause.) How ...”