“... Four neighbours – Estelle van der Merwe, Johan Stipp, Michele Burger and her husband Charl Johnson – testified that they heard the unmistakeable voice of a woman before the shots were fired: a woman, more than one of them insisted, who sounded as if she feared for her life. On the witness stand, each of them was adamant that the voice of the person ...”

“... terms in which it was rendered into English by such as Standish O’Grady, Lady Gregory and Douglas Hyde, who became president of Ireland at the time the book was being completed. But it is too easy to make these connections between Joyce and O’Brien and too easy also to misread O’Brien’s regular assaults on Joyce as an aspect of his bitterness or ...”

“... Amis on Larkin as an undergraduate, Charles Monteith on publishing Larkin, Barry Bloomfield and Douglas Dunn on Larkin the librarian, and others) neatly circumambulates the poet, who has made it clear that in a sense life began for him when the good poetry began, at 20 or even 30, and the ‘Toads’ poems probably say as much as one wants to know about the ...”

“... its product offering.’ I heard that the military was developing robot soldiers. I heard Gordon Johnson of the Joint Forces Command at the Pentagon say: ‘They don’t get hungry. They’re not afraid. They don’t forget their orders. They don’t care if the guy next to them has just been shot.’ I heard him say: ‘I have been asked what happens if the ...”

“... that, with his sense of history, he means the Lloyd George who was the patron of Field Marshal Douglas Haig, and the guarded admirer of Hitler, just as much as he means the Lloyd George who was the father of Welsh Disestablishment. And one must suppose that he comprehends FDR the originator of the war economy, and FDR the prime mover of American ...”

“... Moser and I have walk-on parts in Ryan’s tale. Moser inadvertently destroyed the reputation of Douglas Henderson, the American Ambassador in La Paz in 1967, by filming him playing croquet while Bolivia burned. My own report about CIA involvement in the Bolivian war evidently fuelled a debate which led the CIA to claim too much credit for its role in ...”