“... down in the light of broad day. His assassin was murdered on camera while in maximum security. Richard Nixon’s intimates fed high-denomination dollar bills into a shredder in order to disguise their provenance in the empire of – Howard Hughes? Marilyn Monroe fucked both Kennedy brothers before taking her own life, if she did indeed take it. Frank ...”

“... professionals must be included Robert and Monica Beckinsale; among the self-confessed amateurs, Richard Muir. The Beckinsales – one native to the north Cots-wolds and the other to the Vale of the White Horse – present what is for them the English heartland. Richard Muir, nostalgic ...”

“... about its natural history published in 1788 by its devoted, life-long inhabitant, the Rev. Gilbert White. Editions of that classic have by now become legion. Just as all leading actors have to play Hamlet at some time in their career, so it almost seems that every well-known figure on the natural history scene is cajoled sooner or later into producing a ...”

“... One of the aims of anthropology,’ Richard Rudgley says, ‘is to understand the self by way of the other.’ Are we to take it that if the Koryaks of Siberia had a high old time on the fly-agaric – or on the recycled urine of a fly-agaric consumer – we too should stock up on magic mushrooms? Rudgley maintains that humans have ‘a universal need for liberation from the restrictions of mundane existence, satisfied by experiencing altered states of consciousness ...”

“... cats, to the Boss, head of the Vietnamese underworld in Paris.The bags actually contain drugs, a white powder the Boss refers to as ‘the remedy’, which seems sometimes to be heroin and at other times cocaine. One of the bags has been mistakenly switched with actual civet coffee, a gift to Man’s aunt, who welcomes the narrator into her home and ...”

“... damp and dilapidated house in Italy with dodgy investments and asset sales, in Davy Chadwick; Richard Verey in Slide, after spells in the Foreign Service and on Wall Street, effectively on the run from himself, finally forced back to what he knows best of all after running out of world: ‘I might not be here, in this ridiculous landscape, hurrying down ...”

“... Committee on Finance and Industry, moreover, Keynes looked forward eagerly to debating it with Sir Richard Hopkins, the Treasury’s official spokesman. Yet this contest, for one reason or another, was never joined on level terms, for neither in the Treasury Memorandum of 1929, countering the Liberal scheme, nor in Hopkins’s evidence to the Macmillan ...”

“... Dealer. The man who started this frivolous auction was William Safire, former speechwriter to Richard Nixon and now columnist for the New York Times. He it was who, during the dismal days of the Jimmy Carter Presidency, came up with ‘Koreagate’, ‘Peanutgate’, ‘Billygate’ and – his own favourite, concerning some fiddle of government expenses ...”

“... they had ‘set all the town together by the ears, which is the true office of a Puritan’. John White, the patriarch of Dorchester, and his allies, got a touring company of players banned, only to be attacked as a ‘counterfeit company and pack of Puritans’. It is one of the skills of this book that it encourages sympathy with both sides in the disputes ...”

“... hates them all and is anguished with boredom. Then he comes across a reproduction of a portrait of Richard III and likes what he sees. ‘Someone too conscientious. A worrier; perhaps a perfectionist … He had that incommunicable, that indescribable look that childhood suffering leaves behind it.’ It’s a lot of romance to read into a medieval ...”

“... important as the two-dimensional image. There are plenty of details in the exhibition catalogue by Richard Brettell (Yale, £16.95) which help you appreciate what is going on at brush-stroke level, but to test what is said you must go to the paintings themselves.In the pictures on show the size of the marks is large in relation to the size of the canvas and ...”

“... and incapable of bitterness, I learned that the Occupation had not been a matter of black and white moral choices. If this marvellous book of Cobb’s has a spiritual father, then it is not a Frenchman but a German: Heinrich Böll. And the novel of Böll’s which counted was, very plainly, Der Zug war pünktlich – The train was on time – that ...”

“... hat (Class 2, Civil Uniform, Napoleon style, with double leaf of gold bullion on one side and a white ostrich feather border round the top) his first devoirs were to the Arab presidents, not to the French Délégué Général. And his first duty for the presidents, he felt, was to help them get free elections, and soon. This would be followed, and soon, by ...”

“... differentiation of colour between them, except where some of the sections are painted in lead white. What distinguishes the sections are subtle differences in the weighting of the paint. Here we have the origins of the tesserae, which, in a few years’ time, are going to take over the work. Meanwhile, the paintings increasingly assume the character of ...”

“... within it – and with a sense of humour entirely lacking in historical novelists.’ In London, Richard Ollard, an editor at Macmillan, was similarly impressed by O’Brian’s ‘originality, gusto and … really astonishing knowledge of the sources’. He was ‘a more than competent hand at characterisation’, Ollard, a former navy ...”