“... hospital supplies for the American Fund for the French Wounded. They drove around in a Model T Ford, which they named ‘Auntie’. Stein had a habit of ‘talking and forgetting about driving’. When Toklas told her they were on the wrong road, she responded: ‘Wrong or right, this is the road and we are on it.’ Their taste for eccentric clothing ...”

“... could be the difference between being a statistic in a Channel 4 filler and being reincarnated by Richard Burton. Only losers leave their stories to the East London Advertiser and the more literate class of probation officer. Take that McVicar. He was totally out of order. An armed robber, ‘one of the top men of his profession’ (Lambrianou), he blew all ...”

“... were didactic – ‘one of the things they were about was the indisposability of plastic.’ Richard Deacon, who is with Cragg ‘the most expensive, the most written about, the best patronised ... of the new British sculptural establishment’, makes startling hybrids: ‘To produce one of his small sculptures an old brass navigational aid must have ...”

“... arrived in New York; he was greeted as a hero.Among the friends he made in America was Patrick Ford, the editor of the Irish World, a newspaper with a circulation of 125,000. In 1876, Ford and O’Donovan Rossa set up what they called ‘a skirmishing fund’ to assist in the planning and carrying out of a bombing ...”

“... No Wit depends. For Shakespeare, the theatre could stand for deceit or shallow imposture, as in Richard III’s antics or Antony’s ‘excellent dissembling’; but it was just as likely to suggest the possibility of more profound psychological transformations, as in the elusiveness of Bottom’s dream or Cleopatra’s mysterious ‘becomings’. Not so in ...”

“... apparent eagerness to wage nuclear war. Their campaign had a considerable impact, and when Richard Nixon got to the White House four years later he was convinced that scientists were a dangerously anti-Republican political lobby. Nixon shut down the Office of Science and Technology, and kicked the presidential science adviser out of the cabinet – an ...”

“... Fukuyama has arrived at a similar conclusion, and among fictional characters, the heroine of Richard Condon’s novel The Final Addiction. Like them, Fisher insists that the ingenuity of global capitalism now flows into all the interstices of out lives, and that, with its sublime new products, it will revolutionise all our former assumptions. He declares ...”

“... for his deviousness and dishonesty, remarkable for his complex and psychotic personality. Ford was an accident, an afterthought President who had little opportunity to demonstrate that those who described him as being without either ability or personality were wrong. Carter was inexperienced, unpredictable and weak. Reagan, even for his loyal ...”

“... author also of Amazing Grace: The Story of America’s Most Beloved Song and a biography of Cliff Richard – can’t be unaware of the implied contrast with the Paschal lamb of Exodus 12.46 and the fulfilment of the Scripture in the Gospel of John, chapter 19 (‘Then came the soldiers, and brake the legs of the first, and of the other which was crucified ...”

“... really did do a lot of work on optometry (and on electricity, and he did write his ghastly Poor Richard advice column, as becomes increasingly significant as the novel goes on). And Washington really was a surveyor and land-speculator, though I wouldn’t like to say about the kasha varnishkies or the hemp. Even Gershom, who must be a total invention, is an ...”

“... she was determined to maintain Cecil’s brisk, persecutory line. One of her 1916 articles smeared Ford Madox Hueffer as a Jew who wrote unpatriotic books. Hueffer was Catholic and had been gassed while on active service in France, but no matter. Another article attacked Whitechapel Jews for going to Underground shelters when Zeppelins dropped explosives, thus ...”

“... We Have that They Don’t: Anglo-American Poetic Relations since the War’, organised by Mark Ford and Steve Clark under the aegis of the University of London. Few 20th-century events, even in literary history alone, were at once important and relatively harmless. One was the rise and fall of Anglo-American literature. I use the term, in what may be too ...”

“... the ‘inheritance of power’ that occurred with Bashar al-Assad’s succession in 2000. But Richard Cromwell seriously tried to liberalise the Protectorate; the army felt threatened and deposed him after nine months. Assad fell ill in 1983 and it seemed for a moment that his younger brother, Rifat, would take over, in what would have been an ...”

“... photographs line the inside cover of Moser’s book like a wall of publicity stills), Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Robert Mapplethorpe, and, later, her partner Annie Leibovitz. Sontag’s post-cancer skunk-stripe hair made her instantly spottable. For those hitting the right places in Manhattan, Sontag sightings were as recurring and oddly reassuring as Warhol ...”

“... Carrier factory in Indiana that produces air conditioners, but with similar reverse migrations at Ford and Boeing – were a timely piece of political cunning and showmanship. His thank-you tour and the roughly 30,000 jobs he can claim to have brought back were strategically placed in the swing states that clinched his majority in the electoral college. In ...”