“... Newspaper Axis, American newspaper owners are shown putting their weight behind isolationism, what William Randolph Hearst preferred to call ‘America first’. He commissioned Hitler and Mussolini to write for his many newspapers (at $1 a word), and was delighted that Hitler had restored ‘character and courage’ to Germany. At a time when most Americans ...”

“... him it was ‘the most ecstatic reaction I have seen to any book I have known anything about’. William Empson welcomed ‘a grand biography’; Cyril Connolly, though naturally disappointed not to find himself mentioned, nevertheless recognised something ‘truly masterly’; and Frank Kermode wrote that Ellmann’s account would ‘fix Joyce’s image for ...”

“... and Caroline’s half-brother, Blaise. The most important historical figures are Hay, Henry Adams, William Randolph Hearst, and Presidents McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt, though there are cameo appearances from many others, including Adams’s brother Brooks, author of the imperialist manifesto Law of Civilisation and Decay (1895), and Henry James, as well as ...”

“... and, separately, from the United States Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, whose boss, General William Westmoreland, had the Shakespearean sounding title of COMUSMACV. (In the flesh, Westy came over more as a hard-driving business executive.) On one busy day in the flourishing Saigon black market I bought an American fatigue uniform, boots, jungle hat and ...”

“... treatment of religion and a Harlem only barely understood south of 125th Street, was compared to William James and William Faulkner. In Paris in 1950 Baldwin had read A Portrait of the Artist and its hero’s story was not lost on him. The need to do battle with religion and his own oppressed nation, some of whose members ...”

“... is adaptable to any number of wistful daydreams – had Lincoln not been assassinated, or Bobby Kennedy – or more sombre fantasies, like Philip K. Dick’s Man in the High Castle, in which Germany and Japan win the Second World War and divide the US between them. But these historical variants are not genuine time-travel narratives on the order of ...”

“... Dennis Hopper and Harry Dean Stanton) in a boxing match against another prisoner, Dragline (George Kennedy), through his dogged willingness to offer up his body as a punchbag. It’s one of Newman’s best performances and was forced out of him by Rosenberg, who realised he had to ‘disturb him a little’. In one scene, he told him: ‘Shit, we’ve got a ...”

“... get briefly adopted by the Cleveland Plain Dealer. The man who started this frivolous auction was William Safire, former speechwriter to Richard Nixon and now columnist for the New York Times. He it was who, during the dismal days of the Jimmy Carter Presidency, came up with ‘Koreagate’, ‘Peanutgate’, ‘Billygate’ and – his own ...”

“... Siodmak, Frank Sinatra, Sylvia Sidney, Claire Trevor, Franchot Tone, Walter Wanger, Keenan Wynn, William Wyler, Orson Welles, Billy Wilder, Jerry Wald and Robert Young. Ronald Reagan, a New Deal Democrat at the time (and an FBI informant since 1941), decided after considerable brooding not to join the First Amendment protest. He spoke out anyway in roughly ...”

“... view. The most widely read study was The Arms of Krupp, a thousand-page epic published in 1968 by William Manchester, better known for his account of the assassination of his wartime friend, John F. Kennedy, Death of a President. Written in a racy, sometimes sensational style, the book was full of sweeping generalisations ...”

“... as it was possible to get – was first heard soon after war broke out in September 1939. William Joyce, aka Lord Haw-Haw, delivered his commentaries on the progress of the war from a studio in Hamburg with a brio that made him, in Stourton’s words, a ‘genuine star at a time when the BBC was still dominated by the cult of anonymous authority, by ...”

“... among ordoliberal dogmatists in Europe, such as Wilhelm Röpke, who accused the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations of endangering the racial unity of the West by pursuing socialistic ideas of equality. In Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism, Quinn Slobodian tracks the circulation of Röpke’s ideas among right-wing Americans ...”

“... on screen, and stopped hiring men who were bald or had acne. (According to the memoir of William Sullivan, one of his deputies, an agent who lost his hair after he’d been hired wouldn’t be sacked, but would be ‘kept out of the public eye’.)The misleadingly named ‘crime records division’ of the bureau became a public relations ...”

“... about writing or assembling poems), its slow take-off then rapid ascent; his election in 1911 as Kennedy Professor of Latin at Cambridge; his separate apotheoses as scholar and poet. Apart from a sabbatical term in 1934, he lectured in Cambridge twice a week for 25 years, until only days before his death. He was aware that the less he said the more was said ...”

“... his tone when he wrote to the Deweys. He knew how to impress them. In February 1962, when Jackie Kennedy made her television tour of the White House, Capote wrote to the Deweys: Yes, I knew Jackie was doing the TV tour, and am delighted to hear it was such a success: it was very thoughtful of you to write to her, Marie. She knows all about the Dewey family ...”