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“... but a guy liked to have good hair. Then some magic descended on him, and the magician was John Huston, who wrote the script for High Sierra (1941). It’s the story of a veteran gangster, Roy Earle, who wants peace and a new life. But as he comes out of prison, the girl he likes dumps him and he’s on the hook for one more job. Huston saw him ...”

“... back out into space. The existence of the effect was first posited in 1859 by the Irish scientist John Tyndall, who said that without the greenhouse effect ‘the warmth of our fields and gardens would pour itself unrequited into space, and the sun would rise upon an island held fast in the iron grip of frost’. The Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius added to ...”

“... Sierra reinhabitation, as Snyder saw it, he took on reading tours and an academic position at UC Davis, fifty miles down the road near the state capital, Sacramento. He called his land Kitkitdizze, after the Wintu Indian name for the aromatic shrub known as bear clover. Sliding down the electric window of the Chevrolet, to give Emi’s snout the opportunity ...”

“... was pulled out of college to support his family. For eight years he worked nights at the Davis Perfection Bakery, bootlegging and kiting cheques: a ‘period of horror’. His writing career began with journalism, a detective story and ghosting for an expatriate Austrian baron and his friends (‘a real nest of Nazis’). He broke into film as a ...”

“... Mary Patterson, married Lewis Sheridan Leary in 1858. The following year, Leary was recruited by John Brown for his suicidal raid on Harpers Ferry, and the bullet-riddled shawl that was eventually returned to Mary was in due course used as a blanket for the infant Langston (a middle name – he was baptised James, after his father). Mary’s next ...”

“... he warned. ‘The wave of population will break upon that shore, and roll back upon itself.’ John Maynard Keynes, who made no secret of his admiration for Malthus, attributed the First World War and the Russian Revolution to overpopulation and global competition for food. The ‘great acceleration’ of the second half of the 20th century, a period of ...”

“... the cards were the sameSuch intimacy comes at the expense of her relationship with her partner, John, since as a male he can’t be allowed to trespass onto territory that seems oddly sacred, given that it represents the violation of body and will. If he crossed that boundary, ‘my reply could only be an outburst, could only be Fuck you, this is not ...”

“... has anyone else, much, in the 36 years since Shaw’s death, except the predicted biographers. St John Ervine skimmed their scandalous cream in his ill-tempered centenary life in 1956. Other scholars have browsed them for background material, notably Norman and Jeanne MacKenzie in their book The Fabians. But it has taken until now for any publisher to be ...”

“... of convention. That said, the books are hardly subversive. Father is in the Navy, where John and Roger expect to follow him. Mate Susan, caring and cooking, is training herself for middle-class wifehood. Her mother, though reared in the Australian outback, is (unlike Ransome’s remarkable second wife) very content to employ servants. Through Slump ...”

“... the case was Ridgewell himself. Hall wrote thatthe evening paper report added that ‘Mr Timothy Davis, prosecuting, said that after a series of attacks on the Northern Line British Transport Police set up a special patrol. Shortly before 11 p.m. on 18 February Det. Sgt Derek Ridgewell got into an empty carriage at Stockwell Station – and the gang followed ...”

“... in Catalan in 1848 which inspired a generation of nationalists; in the same year in Ireland Thomas Davis wrote the song ‘A Nation Once Again’. Both Catalan and Irish politicians could, and still can, play tricks with the arithmetic of the Cortes in Madrid and the Mother of Parliaments in Westminster. But it was the general shape and atmosphere of Catalan ...”

“... had mentioned but not dwelt on in the first volume would be the hallmark of democratic societies. John Stuart Mill, who had complained that the one weakness of the first volume was a confusion between the effects of political democracy and those of social and economic equality, now saw more plainly how Tocqueville’s anxieties linked them – and promptly ...”

“... This, pioneered in French by Le Roi Ladurie (Montaillou, 1975), and in English by Natalie Zemon Davis (The Return of Martin Guerre, 1983) and Robert Darnton (The Great Cat Massacre, 1984), involves giving a detailed description of events in the lives of ordinary people and is almost always based on court records – A Trial of Witches is a good, The ...”

“... and vibrates as he recalls Paul Henreid taking a smoke from his own lips and passing it to Bette Davis (Now, Voyager). With approval, he cites the mass meeting of young women at Teheran University; every pouting lip framing a cigarette in protest at a Khomeini fatwah against smoking for females. In spite of the misogyny of certain styles of smoking ...”

“... blonde’ who presides over the ticket cage at a Bowery cinema, and the Rev. Mr James Jefferson Davis Hall, ‘the greatest and most frightening street preacher in the city’. There is the founder of Captain Charley’s Private Museum for Intelligent People, where the exhibits include Theodore Roosevelt’s pith helmet and a parasol said to have belonged ...”