“... as an anti-pastoral setting for the picnic. The Indian delegation set about to boil their rice but while we were unpacking the other picnic fare, we were rudely shocked by a gruff voice demanding, ‘What the hell’s going on here?’ There hove into view a sheriff … with a gun in his hand. ‘Doesn’t anybody in this gang know how to read?’ he ...”

“... the aftermath of Castle Bravo, a 15-megaton hydrogen bomb that was exploded over Bikini in 1954, John Anjain, a magistrate from nearby Rongelap, reported that ‘women gave birth to creatures that did not resemble human beings: some of the creatures looked like monkeys, some like octopi, some like bunches of grapes.’A little north of the equator, and just ...”

“... art is by no means uniform. ‘Tear up and burn as much as possible,’ she said to her husband, John Middleton Murry, who, with his own publishing interests at heart and a sensibility that favoured a wife leaving a certain kind of literary legacy behind her, did nothing of the kind: so her output can sometimes look sketchy or inconsequential, sometimes ...”

“... about middle-aged women suffering. They were Moore’s The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1955), John McGahern’s The Barracks (1961) and Aidan Higgins’s Langrishe, Go Down (1966). It is no coincidence, either, that the best novels about men in the period after independence dealt with figures in extreme and exquisite isolation, as in the novels of Beckett ...”

“... 10 Downing Street. In Parliament Square, the Hare Krishnas were dishing out free lentils and rice. There was another Morning Star stand. The Fire Brigades Union, which re-affiliated to Labour after Corbyn’s election, had set up a platform for speeches. A message from Corbyn was read out, including a few of his favourite lines: ‘Austerity is a ...”

“... Red River, which separates Vietnam and China. Wet tennies are ‘too akin to wet jungle boots in rice paddies in the war, feet forever damp, prey to rot, immersion disease, blistering and Agent Orange’. Any veteran will recognise such thoughts as our own, old ghosts which intrude uninvited at the least expected, and often, most unwelcome times. In the ...”

“... and dust in Sacramento would be like a plague or a curse – so that Joan’s new husband, John Gregory Dunne, when he came to visit, would use a mischievous finger to write ‘DUST’ here and there. Dunne, who died at the end of last year, was tall, handsome, articulate, funny – the man of the world behind whose attractive show Joan hid and ...”

“... the help he got from Gamlin. Forbes wrote to him at the BBC – at the time Forbes’s name was John Theobald Clarke – and Gamlin wrote back, telling Forbes that his letter was so extraordinary he would have to meet him. When they met Gamlin said it would be necessary for him to change his name. ‘Another young actor, ahead of me,’ Forbes wrote years ...”

“... which led some to gravitate toward the fringes of American society both left and right. John Rambo, for his part, did both. In First Blood (1982), Sylvester Stallone’s character is a ‘half-German, half-Indian’ veteran, traumatised by the war, who arrives in a small town to pay his respects to a black comrade killed by exposure to Agent ...”

“... more or less identical shops selling more or less identically adulterated and stale items of rice, cooking oil, kerosene, biscuits, cigarettes and jaggery’. It is this background, the anything but bucolic world of Laxmangarh, that propels him to seek employment in the provincial city and mining centre of Dhanbad. Here, after a bit of instruction from a ...”

“... to face the task of getting the building off the ground had every reason to be intimidated. Peter Rice of Arups, who had worked in Sydney on the Opera House, another competition-winner which demanded innovative engineering, was the only person who thought the building would go up. Appleyard’s account of the politics and chicanery, of the heroic scale of the ...”

“... he could be persuaded to do so, it might remake him as an actor. The example of Olivier and Archie Rice was invoked, with high-sounding phrases like ‘taking his proper place in the modern theatre’. In retrospect, it seems silly, conceited and always futile. Kenneth More had no intention of remaking himself as an actor. Why should he? His public liked him ...”

“... worldwide is another giveaway of their provenance, since, according to the Chicago Tribune’s John Crewdson, ‘only nine companies’ – including Premier Executive Transport Services – ‘have Pentagon permission to land aircraft at military bases worldwide.’ The US Army’s Aeronautical Services Agency publishes an annual unclassified list of ...”

“... Falklands, where lightning can ignite the tussock-grass in spring. You can make a case for John Davis or Sir Richard Hawkins, just as if you are not English you can make a case for some earlier Iberian voyage. The articles ‘Falkland’s Islands’ in the last two editions of the Encyclopedia Britannica give the honour to the English as if there was ...”

“... Foodstuffs were another frequent cargo: wheat and salt primarily, also fruit, rice, spices, oil and wine. But to compartmentalise his commodities belies the opportunism and diversity of the ladings: ‘Toledo blades, Valencian soap, ivory tusks and ostrich feathers’; ‘37 bales of pilgrims’ robes, 191 pieces of lead and 80 ...”