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“... of breaststroking on a kindly thermal above the lesser towers and steeples of London, like St Nicholas of Bari in the quattrocento painting by Bicci di Lorenzo in the Ashmolean. But the fantasy doesn’t quite play. The integrity of the view is broken by squared columns and the metal frames of window panels, turning the spread of the city below into a ...”

“... an earlier age, in which, presumably, Americans regarded their enemies with amused courtliness at best and a chivalrous anger at worst. Gone from the record are the genocidal campaigns against native Americans, or the various interventions, from Central and South America to the Pacific, North Africa, Europe and Asia, pitting Americans against local enemies ...”

“... hard to cultivate since the end of the Troubles.Xenophobia: In December, the BBC correspondent Nicholas Watt talked to an unnamed ‘Tory grandee’ who insisted that ‘the Irish really should know their place’ when it came to Brexit. (‘You’d swear we created the problem,’ the taoiseach had complained in October.) On 16 December, Fergal Keane ...”

“... have been involved in simultaneously writing The Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist, then beginning Nicholas Nickleby nine months before Oliver Twist was finished as relentless monthly serialisation schedules obliged him to meet deadline after deadline. By the time the tenth and last child was born, he was publishing his ninth novel. He was also editing ...”

“... cellars, cooperage, cobbled yards – acted, along with the Spitalfields fruit and veg market and Nicholas Hawksmoor’s Christ Church, as a buffer-reef against the encroachment of the City. A benevolent and paternalistic employer was lost, along with the heady drench of hops from the brewery and the wild gardens of adjacent streets. Joseph flogged the ...”

“... other stirring deeds, his upright hero Erast Fandorin thwarts a plot to hold the coronation of Nicholas II to ransom. More than 15 million copies of the Fandorin series have been sold since 1998, and box-office hits have duly followed. The Councillor of State, in which Fandorin rescues the throne, stars Russia’s favourite actor/film-maker Nikita ...”

“... fed to the New York Post consisting of make-believe quotes from his then mistress Marla Maples (‘Best Sex I’ve Ever Had’) became a PR platform for the licensing of his celebrated name to murky investors from Russia, China and Saudi Arabia who were looking for an American frontman. His salvation was a double play of a con.The glitzier the gigantic bronze ...”