“... narrator was born and grew up, and which Deighton knew only as the destination of parcels at the King’s Cross sorting office where he’d worked over one Christmas holiday. Giving the character Lancashire origins was an attempt to put some distance between author and narrator, a distance narrowed by the films. Harry Palmer is a Londoner. Deighton was born ...”

“... families in the world, and Gavin Newsom’s father was their ‘consigliere’. In 1973, when John Paul Getty III was kidnapped by the Calabrian mafia, it fell to Bill Newsom to fly to Italy to get him back. At first he suspected that his godson – ‘Little Paul’, a trust fund kid locked out of his trust – might have staged his own abduction, but ...”

“... downwards.’ The profound patriotism of Shelley and Byron, the inability to think logically of John Stuart Mill and Cardinal Newman and Lewis Carroll? No, it won’t do, and Orwell, for once, was talking through his hat – perhaps relaxing in what he considered an ‘English’ manner. It really seems, then, not quite proper that distinguished experts ...”

“... thinks the same way. These may be provincial views but they are not necessarily mistaken. Pope John Paul evidently does not think they are. His journey to Central America was that of an enraged (and conceivably ill-advised) chief constable come to impose order on an unruly populace and on his own badly-disciplined rank and file. The plaza where the Pope ...”

“... He parcelled out his Beagle specimens to white-collar naturalists: to zoological craftsmen like John Gould (who reciprocated by christening a new rhea darwinii after him). Darwin modelled his Zoology on Humboldt’s Zoologie, acting as taskmaster and paymaster chivvying a Gradgrind work-force. Not that he was incapable of such work himself. Although in ...”

“... that the intention be actualised (genocidal wishes are too commonplace: ‘I want to see the last king strangled with the guts of the last priest,’ ‘one settler, one bullet,’ ‘Nuke lran/q’ etc). However, his requirement that genocide refer only to the killing of entire ‘national, ethnic, racial, religious, political, social, gender or economic ...”

“... English versions of the books of secrets could be picked up from dealers like the pharmacist John Hester, whose shop acted as an important centre of recipes and useful lore, while on stage Marlowe had Faustus, an avid reader of these books, abandon law and divinity for the science which gave him the secret of universal mastery. Works on ...”

“... the United States began a shift from the republic of inclusion shaped by Lincoln, Carnegie, and King to the republic of exclusion prophesied by Cotton Mather, John D. Rockefeller and George Lincoln Rockwell. The mask was accepted by Dylan, but worn more lightly. In ‘Lo and Behold!’ it floats just in front of the ...”

“... and they do keep cropping up. I think there’s more than a little Pynchon floating around John Kennedy Toole, whose A Confederacy of Dunces is a book nearly as bloated as its protagonist; Don DeLillo’s social, um, satires owe more than a little to Pynchon’s work; and in a recent essay in Harper’s magazine the young novelist Jonathan Franzen ...”

“... will be no one but soldiers and bandits. Jorge Luis Borges, ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ John Bagot Glubb, a young lieutenant bearing wounds from the war in France, arrived in Mesopotamia in 1920. His assignment was to command armed patrols through the desert of what would become, under its first Western occupier, Iraq. The British bureaucracy, he ...”

“... describes William Barrett, a doctor active in the Society for Psychical Research, assisting John Tyndall, a leading scientific naturalist, when Tyndall was demonstrating the effects of sound on light at the Royal Institution in the 1860s. Shaking a bunch of keys, or chirruping, or clapping loudly from a distance, Tyndall showed that he could quell the ...”

“... wrote a fulsome poem for the front of the book, paid for its publication, presented it to the King, and reviewed it in the Royal Society’s journal, which he himself edited. He made a profit of at least £10 out of the sales of the book. Few others got a look behind the scenes of this amazing work. Its impenetrability, and that of its author, became ...”

“... inhabitants of that same country, and not only in England. Across the Channel they wondered why a king should choose to marry his mistress. (The whole point is, however, that Anne never was Henry’s mistress, whereas her sister Mary was. When Henry was accused of having slept not only with Anne’s sister but with her mother, he disarmingly ...”

“... convention that can be irritating when it is clear that a perfectly ordinary individual, not a king or even a newspaper, is speaking. American reviewers had a good model in Edmund Wilson’s unaffected prose. The tone of English criticism varied from Ezra Pound’s egotistical shouting to the confident elegance of the Sunday paper reviewers, and, in ...”

“... if sedition were being brewed on their premises. This was a significant threat: shortly after the king backed down from his banning order, several proprietors were arrested for continuing to permit ‘seditious discourses, and spreading false and seditious news’. Until the end of Charles II’s reign, and beyond, London’s coffee houses continued to be ...”