“... it even takes avoiding action in respect of its own apocryha. Their fame has lasted from that day – the first years of the 17th century – to this. Quixote, his squire, his adventures and enchanters, still matter; they are one of the legends of the romantic modern world. The literature of Romanticism seized on the work in order to discuss ...”

“... he chucked his typewriter out of the office window and resigned, bunking off to a life of three-day novellas, quick money and lightning debts. Dissolve and fast-forward: now it’s an age of smooth men, of judgments based on appearance. Commentators are quick to read the signs, the measured droop of Lord Bragg’s handkerchief, the precise organisation of ...”

“... he had been a Middle Spirit fitted very well. It would be unfitting if he were summoned to the Day of Judgment, so the educated tended to assume that this would not happen. Cornelius Agrippa does not face the question, but he was a very adroit writer who maintains a splendid ease, considering how likely he was to be burnt alive; and maybe, if he had faced ...”

“... It is very heavy and I loaded it into my car with difficulty. My mother, who was with me that day, was unusually quiet as I drove her home. She simply said: ‘If you open that suitcase you’ll never close it again.’While she enjoys certain kinds of complication (seating mourners correctly at a funeral, insulting someone with a second-class ...”

“... reflex, the Agatha Christie cornerstone, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Or as Derek Raymond (Robin Cook) frequently proclaimed, paraphrasing Edmund Wilson: ‘who gives a fuck who killed Roger Ackroyd?’ Raymond, attempting in The Hidden Files to define the ‘black novel’ in which he specialised, glossed the Jamesian school as ‘pretentious escapist ...”

“... which all the amphetamine gunslingers proved their manhood: Jim Thompson, Harry Dean Stanton and Robin Cook (a.k.a. Derek Raymond). Penman was the writer who isn’t in the book, talking to people who are, or were, or ought to be. His patch was cinema arcana, curating the ‘sessions men’ as he calls them, jobbing actors with faces full of motel ...”

“... two who claimed to have fired the last bullet into the US’s arch-nemesis. Books like No Easy Day: The Autobiography of a Navy SEAL (2012) and Damn Few: Making the Modern SEAL Warrior (2013) are shot through with anti-establishment ressentiment, bitterness and boatloads of swagger. A special operative can find himself being played by Mark Wahlberg in a ...”

“... it’s a sort of competition, a security test.’ On 15 January 1990 – Martin Luther King Day – AT–T’s long-distance telephone switching system went out of action for nine hours. About seventy million calls went uncompleted. Three days later the United States Secret Service – an organisation originally set up to protect the President ...”

“... for two years,’ he writes of his time as a Parliamentary Secretary, ‘when Alec Home saw me one day in the House of Lords and asked me to come to his office “to have a word”.’ What Home wanted to know was ‘whether I would be prepared to go as British High Commissioner to Australia’. On leaving that job in 1959, Lord Carrington receives at sea a ...”

“... a while to recover from the massiveness of that statement, and its inappropriateness to, say, Robin Cook, but it does identify something quintessential to Fergusson. I’m sure Dunn is right to reject ‘po-faced’ readings of the elegy, and to claim that it upholds the resilience of the Scots musical tradition even as it pronounces its demise: O ...”

“... known as the Beefeaters), who, as late as 1813, received a ration of nearly two pounds of meat a day, including more than twelve ounces of beef. They could accompany it with that favourite English side dish, plum pudding, and wash it down with a per diem ration of a gallon of beer. It was no easy matter to keep a huge joint turning over the fire, and the ...”

“... 3 October), identifies the reading as the movement’s ‘birth certificate’: the following day Ferlinghetti cabled Ginsberg with an offer to publish Howl in his Pocket Poets series. Two nagging problems about a Beat retrospective. Who did you forget to include? (I’ve just struck the poets Philip Whalen and Philip Lamantia off the record of the Six ...”

“... 1974, Tony Benn was appointed Secretary of State at the Department of Industry. On his first day in the office he was greeted by his Permanent Secretary, Sir Anthony Part, with the words: ‘I presume, Secretary of State, that you do not intend to implement the industrial strategy in Labour’s programme.’ When Benn said he did indeed intend to ...”

“... then the rest of the town) on fire. Those residents of Oradour who had been away for the day, or had managed to escape the round-up, returned to a blackened scene. André Desourteaux had been away, working for the postal service in Limoges. Nine members of his family were among the 642 people who died. Only five of the men in the village ...”

“... a copse in East Anglia where he fully expects to see a red-breasted flycatcher one coming autumn day. The jacket photo shows a bearded man partly concealed by a reedbed, wearing binoculars and a green cap, standing to a curious half-attention. It is like a picture of a first meeting with a member of a previously unencountered tribe, a birder fresh from the ...”