“... Kong she met Alexis Vedeniapine, a British army officer. Olubas tells us that Vedeniapine was ‘a White Russian, born in St Petersburg in 1916’ who had escaped the Russian Revolution with his family and was brought up in Shanghai before being sent to boarding school in, of all places, Woodford, Essex. From there he entered agricultural college, and worked ...”

“... of print media by the 16th century, ready to distribute protest and propaganda, in black and white words and images, alongside neutral instruction books, maps, engraved reproductions, and texts deemed unprintable in other countries. Kunzle reproduces pages of engraved protest against war, tyranny and the Spanish occupation by such superb graphic artists ...”

“... as a lover an ebullient young man, 15 years younger than herself, who emanated genius. This was William Glock, later to become the most versatile and influential musician of his generation. It was through his ears that I first heard and loved music and therefore started to learn the oboe. He soon fell in love with Katharine, and, sort of, with me (now aged ...”

“... Melville created an austere, sombre aesthetic: even his colour films appear to be in black and white. His protagonists, whether resistants, gangsters or priests, are solitary ‘men without women’, in the words of Volker Schlöndorff, who worked as his assistant in the early 1960s. Driven by duty, they move inexorably towards their fate, which is often ...”

“... has given us a cow creamer she has made. Unglazed, it is chunky and solid and striped black and white like a bovine zebra. It’s a delightful object, a convict cow, and could she be bothered to make more and market them I’m sure they would sell for a substantial price. As it is, it stands on the kitchen table waiting to find its – or her – place. A ...”

“... speech to excoriate Kinnock for his pusillanimity. A future Labour government had waved the white flag before it had even arrived in office: ‘Exposed to the threat of nuclear blackmail,’ she told the conference, ‘there would be no option but surrender.’ She contrasted the weakness of Kinnock’s position with that of more robust Labour ...”

“... in Mile End because the markets were better over there, but at least Westfield was near her now in White City. She was 31. ‘I was born in Egypt 11,426 days ago,’ she told one of her neighbours, pleased with the new app on her iPhone that could count days. Rania was a great fan of Snapchat, she posted there every spare minute she had, and on Instagram and ...”

“... spy is treated as simple fact, as is his claim that FDR’s most trusted adviser. Harry Dexter White, the founder of the IMF and the World Bank, was also working for the Kremlin. The intellectual level of the book is perhaps best illustrated by Pincher’s laborious attempt to construct a mathematical equation to explain treason. The equation, in case LRB ...”

“... couldn’t possibly have been a lover. His massive pipe was scarcely [sic] out for a start – the White Cottage carpets reeked of pipe tobacco for twenty years ... he hadn’t that ‘mind’s recoil upon itself’ which makes possible passionate uncertainty, the loss of all gravity which goes with falling in love, the giving-of-oneself, the abandon. He was a ...”

“... would have to decide whether it was genuine or a plant. In 1953, the hawkish congressional staffer William Borden, convinced that Oppenheimer was a Soviet agent who had obstructed the development of thermonuclear weapons, prepared a 91-page ‘top secret’ history of work on the hydrogen bomb to set out his case. He entrusted extracts to the Princeton ...”

“... done by a graduate student, which began with an authoritative statement: ‘The work of William Shakespeare was evenly matched with many other authors in Elizabethan and Jacobean society, but modern opinion emphasises his importance as the finest playwright in Western culture.’ Modern opinion can now at last be seen to be false. But where shall we ...”

“... Russia himself. The only secure option would be to ask his host and friend, the British ambassador William Hayter, to send Dr Zhivago to London in the bag. This might explain how the Foreign Office was able to copy the typescript onto two rolls of microfilm and hand it over to MI6, which in turn delivered it to the CIA, with dreadful consequences for ...”

“... your life culturally reflected, it may become the template for adult aesthetic experience. The white suburban boy-child of the 1950s playing cowboys and Indians could invisibly rehearse all-male dramas. The one who got excited when the Indians won was already on the path to dissidence. There’s one cultural artefact discussed in the book that isn’t an ...”

“... and it is here that her life becomes Technicolor again, no more subtle Acoma pots or black and white piano keys. Instead there are parrots and toy planes and floors of raked dazzling sand and heroin for him, now on and now off, and more and more drinking for her. The memoir ends with the unfinished sentence: ‘Buddy lay curled up and shaking violently on ...”

“... I feel certain, got it more quickly. ‘How long were you in Vietnam?’ he was asked in 1975 by William Heath, who later edited Conversations with Robert Stone (2016). Heath’s flat question was impossible to ignore. ‘Just a couple of months, something under three months,’ Stone said, ‘which is, I admit, not very long, but all I can tell you is every ...”