“... his ‘special writers’, just so as they’d have somewhere to spread their elbows in New York. William Faulkner was never out of there. Always at night. Always drunk. But one morning even Cerf got fed up with the brewery toxins in the office hum. He took back the key. Another of Cerf’s specials, Truman Capote, a young goldfish new-swimming into the ...”

“... Katherine Mansfield standing in a London garden, with a line of washing hanging behind them like a white flag of truce or surrender); Lawrence’s severed friendship with Bertrand Russell; the suppression of The Rainbow in 1915; the dim years (1916-17) in Cornwall, when the Lawrences were being investigated by government authorities as possible German ...”

“... in the prose. ‘The range and grasp of his mind is always evident in the present book,’ William Empson wrote in a review of the essay collection The Dyer’s Hand, quoted by Davenport-Hines, ‘but it strikes me that his mind is increasingly hampered, and that the resulting thoughts are often wrong ... he twitters like a curate in ...”

“... 1980s, long before many of the other groups represented at Genoa were formed. The Tute Bianche (‘white overalls’) are a more recent and distinctively Post-Modern phenomenon, committed to the deconstruction of the opposition between violence and non-violence, but they, too, have roots in the autonomist movements of the 1970s. Demonstrations of this kind ...”

“... of mad writers, Hölderlin, Nerval and Christopher Smart. The more genial and indeed congenial William Gass describes Walser more modestly: ‘He was a kind of columnist before the time of columns.’ And a further, more modest name is offered: ‘The signature “Harmless Crank”,’ Gass suggests, ‘could be appended to quite a few without discordance ...”

“... anything back, even when he is playing around with the truth, is the man whose later career in the White House overlapped with the early years of Blair’s and Howard’s premierships. Bill Clinton was the sincerest liar in modern political history, and what he, and his opponents, and the American public discovered was that the sincerity could easily trump the ...”

“... of his actions and it could be argued that a jury is better equipped than an Oxbridge-educated white male, however venerable, to make an accurate assessment of such circumstances. The Government seems to think juries are so cerebrally challenged that they constantly acquit when they should be convicting, but a Bar Council analysis of Serious Fraud Office ...”

“... venture. A diorama of Adam and Eve committing original sin leads to a room filled with black and white images of the Holocaust, atomic warfare and heroin addicts.We are used to thinking of the battle line between natural science and creationism as the one drawn at the Scopes Trial of 1925, which concerned the teaching of evolution in Tennessee public ...”

“... his paternal grandfather, was a tall, blue-eyed blond – as one historian recently put it, ‘a white man with a Hispanic name’. He took his doctorate in physics at the University of Chicago in 1936, then went to Lawrence’s Radiation Laboratory at Berkeley, where he was based for the rest of his academic career.Lawrence built cyclotrons, complex ...”

“... beach in Venezuela. There was Don Porfirio, and the Perons, and Batista, who always dressed in white and kept taking baths to get rid of his tar. And there was – oh my God, it’s too long a list to suggest coincidence. When the latest avatar dies in Cuba (and he looks more and more like his own waxwork), English writers and journalists won’t have to ...”

“... one had been writing in pencil in a large notebook, and now they had gathered, with bottles of white wine standing on the grass between them, and they were settling down to discuss a member of the family whose arrival had been delayed. Was he a contented person, or a discontented person? Did he really belong to the town, or to the country? Would he have ...”

“... hunter, like the army colonels and senior plantation managers whose stories he listened to in the white men’s club in Kotagiri, who told him that when killing big cats you needed to aim for a good breaking shot into the heart. I suspect that the day he and Belli killed the leopard was the best of his life. He was only 25, and the empire had given him ...”

“... only make men and women speak – give you truth broken into prismatic hues, and fear the pure white light, even if it is in me.’ He is finding fault with himself on grounds Shelley provided: ‘The One remains, the many change and pass;/Heaven’s light forever shines, Earth’s shadows fly;/Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,/Stains the ...”

“... known for an essay published nine years after that. ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ stands, along with William Gibson’s Neuromancer novels, as a founding text of the late 20th-century cyberculture craze and of 1990s cyberfeminism in particular: ‘While the shiny screens … continued to present themselves as clean-living products of the straight ...”

“... in which so many men were North African or Yemeni Jews. “They’re OK as long as they are led by white officers,” he grinned.’ For all his braggadocio, ‘Ben Nitay’ was still floundering well into the 1970s. He gave occasional speeches in the Boston area on behalf of the Israeli government, which recognised an asset in his special forces ...”