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“... Hollis, the director-general of MI5, David Murphy, the CIA chief of Soviet Bloc Intelligence, and James Bennett, head of Canadian counter-espionage, were all denounced as likely Soviet agents by conspiracy theorists within their own services. In his recently published memoirs,* President Carter’s DCI, Stansfield Turner, records that ‘British intelligence ...”

“... full of brilliant and terrifying men. Then Karel came to direct a play by the Italian playwright Franco Brusati. His friend Lindsay Anderson, under whose colours I was hiding, had recommended me to be the assistant director on the play. Soon the play collapsed and I was transferred (I’m not sure I was consulted) to work on the film that Karel had decided ...”

“... de Jouvenel, Drieu la Rochelle and other young idealists to Berlin for a gruesome attempt at a Franco-German rapprochement. That’s about half of what she did. The writing, quoted here, seems already as concrete, intense and precise as it would ever be. Although she had the self-made woman’s disdain for feminism, the qualities of her style were ...”

“... him an inscribed copy of Chroniques and a gold medal depicting Napoleon and Marie Louise), was pro-Franco, and willing to curry favour with the Nazis if it meant he could go on performing in Germany. It is alarming to read on practically the last page of this book that Craft was trying to limit access to a proposed Stravinsky archive at UCLA in case evidence ...”

“... richer tradition than Kissinger’s example suggests. Stretching from Randolph Bourne and William James to George Kennan and William Fulbright, the pragmatic realist tradition in American diplomatic thought held that it was necessary to consider the consequences of ideas and had an outlook characterised by a humane, cosmopolitan restraint in foreign and ...”

“... Jerry Bruck which took apart the case for Alma’s ordering of the symphony – conductors such as James Conlon have reverted to playing the movements in the same order that Mahler did. It makes a huge difference, Conlon has written, to hear the ‘meditative beauty’ of the andante before the ‘acerbic, ironic’ scherzo. The assumption of the Lehrer song ...”

“... History of Reading), exhibition catalogues (the Folger Library’s The Reader Revealed) and maps (Franco Moretti’s Atlas of the European Novel). Book history doesn’t just cross disciplines, it mixes media. But it would be unfair to ask one volume to circumscribe what’s not really a ‘field’ so much as a junction. Pity the scholar torn (in Robert ...”

“... in return for France’s naval support in the Mediterranean. Nor could Britain tolerate a joint Franco-Russian military triumph, which would exclude it from the Mediterranean and jeopardise Egypt and India. Given current imperial strains, there was no logic in making Russia an enemy, while to make one of France would be to commit suicide as a Great ...”

“... evasion charges. The film was due to be screened at the European Parliament and shown by Arte, a Franco-German public television channel. At the eleventh hour, Browder hired Carter-Ruck, the well-known London libel lawyers, to send legal letters to the European Parliament and every organisation involved in making and distributing the film. The screening was ...”

“... during negotiations with Gorbachev over the reunification of Germany, the US secretary of state, James Baker, floated the idea of a pledge not to expand Nato eastwards. But the question of whether US and European leaders ‘promised’ there would be no eastward expansion is neither here nor there: Moscow was under no illusion about US intentions, and in any ...”

“... on ‘funded property’ at 53 Marine Parade with his wife, Charlotte; his 27-year-old nephew, James; and three servants. Less conventionally, he also lived with seven Degas paintings. In 1876 he bought four ballet pictures from the London branch of the Paris dealer Durand-Ruel, quickly followed by two more plus a picture then called Figures in a French ...”

“... the Picasso of the 1920s and early 1930s, before his work was reinvigorated by hostility to the Franco regime and Fascism in general, before he was able to paint Guernica; and, subsequently, the postwar Picasso, whose work became schematic and sentimentalised. Berger was surely right to place the development of Cubism within a political and social ...”

“... between the houses. It is not the streets that exist. It is the streets that no longer exist. James Fenton, ‘A German Requiem’ The topic of international space is like one of those monstrous catfish which used to loaf around the hot-water outfalls of the Berlin power stations. You could hook it, net it, spear it, or even seize it in your arms if it ...”

“... David Runciman, Neal Ascherson, James Butler, T.J. Clark, Jonathan Coe, Sionaidh Douglas-Scott, Daniel Finn, Dawn Foster, Jeremy Harding, Colin Kidd, Ross McKibbin, Philippe Marlière, James Meek, Pankaj Mishra, Jan-Werner Müller, Susan Pedersen, J.G.A. Pocock, Nick Richardson, Nicholas Spice, Wolfgang Streeck, Daniel TrillingDavid RuncimanSo who​ is to blame? Please don’t say the voters: 17,410,742 is an awful lot of people to be wrong on a question of this magnitude ...”

“... a sharper insight into the meaning of ‘post-truth’ in his reflections on the success of pro-Franco propaganda in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War. ‘I know it is the fashion to say that most of recorded history is lies anyway,’ he wrote in 1942. ‘I am willing to believe that history is for the most part inaccurate and biased, but what is ...”