“... One of the strongest and strangest moments in David Lynch’s unsettling TV serial Twin Peaks, part of the dream of wholesome investigating agent Dale Cooper, comes when he is kissed full on the mouth by the figure of Laura Palmer, who was a ‘wild girl’ but is now dead and whose murderer he has come to town to detect ...”

“... it,’ he told a convention of Southern Baptists in June, but ‘as Barbara and I prayed at Camp David before the air war began, we were thinking about those young men and women overseas. And I had the tears start down the checks, and our minister smiled hack, and I no longer worried how it looked to others.’ As his voice broke, and he paused to dab at his ...”

“... Many people would say – there stands English comedy,’ David Frost is reported to have declaimed, as Frankie Howerd and Kenneth Williams stood side by side on his doorstep. Williams was unimpressed. ‘I thought to myself, “Then many people would be lacking in perception,” but shouted drunken goodbyes and reeled down the street into a taxi ...”

“... people’; Lord Curzon’s political career was ‘an ultimate failure’. These quotations from David Cannadine’s collection of essays, Aspects of Aristocracy, show that, for all his gifts, he would not be a front-runner for the editorship of Country Life. Few historians bring more energy and relish to chronicling the ...”

“... in particular. The first and most comprehensive attack on the official version was published by Simha Flapan in The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities in 1988. The same year saw the publication of Benny Morris’s The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949. Morris describes the flight of the Palestinians wave after wave, town ...”

“... Prospero-figure in Arthur Miller’s autobiographical play After the Fall. Maggie replies by eating a handful of pills, and the scene then twists and turns between Quentin’s acknowledged guilt and his defiant belief that she would have done it anyway. Miller survived the long suicide of Marilyn Monroe, but his muse fell silent. Joe DiMaggio, his ...”

“... Roberta Goren’s book should be compulsory reading in every course of peace studies. It explains in great detail how the USSR after Stalin’s death adapted to the nuclear age its strategy for achieving hegemony in a world dominated by the mass media and by weapons of mass destruction ...”

“... slow but now perhaps terminal loss of faith in the working class in whose name the reforms were to be made. But there has been, as yet, no connected account. It might of course be said that although the Social Democrats do now have a history, it is far too soon for them to have a History. Also, Histories, however strongly ...”

“... entred into him and never left him till he came into the country again.’ He had been surrounded by whores, ladies of the Court, and fellow rakes, but now his wife, children, his mother and her chaplain were by his bed. He was in the country, it is true, but there is an extra irony in the fact that instead of dying in the ...”

“... upon Britain. One’s sense of Buchan the man, as derived from the excellent and engaging memoir by his son William, is of someone vastly enjoying life. How else could anyone have done so much and covered so much paper – more than a million words in Nelson’s History of the War alone? But then the consciousness of giving pleasure on such a scale (and it ...”

“... He felt that we (I myself was one of the ‘wimp’ critics he objected to) had been made nervous by his powerful masculinity and, to cover up our fear, we had tried to get macho with his book. Mailer was angry, says The Face, and he was spoiling for a fight. What is it with these New York lit-celebs? A year or two ago, Gore Vidal published a book-length ...”

“... people, was not at all opposed to the censorship of his time. ‘Let us have a strict censorship by all means, but not a senseless one,’ he writes to a friend, as if strictness (strogost) were a cosy and reassuring fact of Russian life, as it might be in England village cricket or well-rolled umbrellas. How else explain ...”

“... Guinea thinly disguised – and replace its tyrannical president with one who will, perhaps, be less tyrannical, and will definitely grant Sir James the highly profitable platinum-mining concession he wants. The operation goes like clockwork – no problems, no mistakes – though there’s a twist at the end. Simon Mann’s Cry Havoc might seem like a ...”

“... The title of David Abulafia’s magisterial book comes, as he reminds us, from a Hebrew blessing, to be recited when setting eyes on the Mediterranean: ‘Blessed are you, Lord our God, king of the Universe, who made the Great Sea.’ His book is a two-fold history: first of the trade and the traders who discovered the sea, created its ports and never ceased thereafter to animate it in pursuit of commerce ...”

“... of a ticket, one could enjoy musical performances and refreshments al fresco, or simply see and be seen. Princes rubbed shoulders with prostitutes, duchesses with doctors’ daughters: the social mix was a large part of the gardens’ attraction at the time and our fascination with them now. They seem to have epitomised the comparative openness of a polite ...”