“... that with hindsight, if I had been a Cuban leader, I think I might have expected a US invasion,’ Robert McNamara, Kennedy’s defence secretary, confessed in 1989. ‘I should say, as well, if I had been a Soviet leader at the time, I might have come to the same conclusion.’ Lipman offers a new and compelling angle on the crisis by examining what was ...”

“... finds his father again in strange circumstances. The scene was once famous, at that high noon when Robert Louis Stevenson thought Meredith second only to Shakespeare. Roy has become a sort of court jester for a German margravine and – to cut a long story short – has agreed to pose as a newly erected equestrian statue in bronze, so that she can win a ...”

“... that ‘the etching on page 187 does not portray Professor Jean Martin Charcot, but Count Robert de Montesquiou-Fezensac.’ Technically the most impressive thing in the book is a 90-page letter from Bella describing her European tour and brutal political education, with the accelerating development of her mind signalled by a transition from sing-song ...”

“... Nicolas Copernicus’s reform of astronomy delivered a formidable blow to our sense of self in nature. In its effects, Copernicanism probably affected human consciousness more deeply than Darwinism. Published in 1543, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres argued that our earthly globe is not the unique and motionless centre of the great cosmic sphere ...”

“... and are prevented by the country’s constitution from arming for any other purpose than immediate self-defence. But their ease has been increasingly disturbed. The United States has wanted to reduce its trading deficit with Japan. It has also been asking Tokyo to make a larger contribution to the wider defence of North-East Asia. By the early Eighties, the ...”

“... the prospect of becoming his own assembly line, all he could think of was Under Under the Volcano. Robert Lowell writes: I memorised tricks to set the river on fire, somehow never wrote something to go back to. Lowry was the absolute opposite, no tricks and a work he was unable to get away from. He described himself as ‘a sometimes subtle if not good ...”

“... writing seems misty-eyed to the point of simple-mindedness – with LPs reduced to the level of self-help manuals – but DeCurtis is doing no more than articulate the conservatism that lies at the heart of both rock criticism and the music industry. ‘The Times They Are A-Changin” and it’s not what they wanted after all. The idea that pop music was ...”

“... worked with James Guthrie at the Peartree Press. She might have lived in Hampstead and gone to Robert Bevan’s Sundays, or tramped with Eleanor Farjeon to Edward Thomas’s cottage. As it was, she found herself in Bloomsbury. Even if they were, as Quentin Bell called them, ‘as amorphous as friends can be’, they were nearly all highly literate, and ...”

“... keeps emerging: their crowds are in constant need of surveillance and policing; the desperate self-imposed task of the theorist is to reduce the crowd’s protean qualities to manageable positive laws, to master the irrational through ‘the social defence’ of science and reason. The point was not, as today, to give out identity cards thereby to ...”

“... at this ingratitude, but his own account suggests ample cause for it. The trouble was that self-appointed experts from further east were forever telling the independent-minded settlers what was best for them. Eastern Montana was apparently so empty, so devoid of physical and social culture, that it could serve as the laboratory for any harebrained ...”

“... One of the difficulties with weapons is that they do not automatically self-destruct once they have fulfilled their function. The problem particularly afflicts Americans who, taking advantage of lax gun-control laws, tend to buy whatever they think they need to defend themselves. But as the danger recedes, they frequently forget about the lethal arsenals they have accumulated ...”

“... Anglo-Norman cuisine diverged from its French counterpart. Moreover – and this underlies a self-imposed limitation in the scope of All Manners of Food – neither French nor English cookery (let alone Italian or Spanish) can be properly understood without taking into account the extra-European influences upon which all relied in different degrees. As ...”

“... was prepared to think in terms less of reproach than of damage limitation. But British plans (and self-defeating British secrecy) dictated, first, that scarcely anything should start before the ultimatum expired, and secondly, that no airborne invasion from Cyprus be attempted before the seaborne reinforcements had arrived from Malta. The allies thus ...”

“... corroboration of the great conspiracy against goodness. Almost as monstrous is the film’s use of Robert Kennedy’s assassination as a mere item in Garrison’s self-vindication and patched-up private life. It proves he was right about everything, and it regains him (immediately) his wife’s love and respect and sexual ...”

“... 1990s, this indisputable record revealed that all previous insider accounts were both wrong and self-serving. Far from being the voice of reason, Bobby Kennedy had been belligerent to an almost hysterical degree, urging not only attacks on the offending missile sites but a full-scale invasion of Cuba – even though, as his own diaries show, he knew that ...”