“... mention at all in a skimpy retrospect of his African tour of February 1960. Quite a few entries read like a summary of events drawn up by someone else. Not often do you get the feeling of being there yourself or of learning something new about how it went, as you do on almost every page of the Crossman diaries. Only the odd languid wisecrack convinces you ...”

“... Among the houses where Thomas was invited was that of the Pringsheims, whose daughter Katia he had read about in a magazine. Her father was a wealthy mathematics professor; he had been a friend of Wagner’s and parties in the house were attended by Mahler and Richard Strauss. ‘One has no thought of Jewishness in regard to ...”

“... think of as normal classic names: Simon, Mark, Peter, Andrew, Paul, Martin, Michael, Stephen, Richard, Robert, David. Girls’ names remained more modish: some Sarahs, Anns and Elizabeths and even some residual Marys, but also plenty of Janets, Jackies, Lisas and Debbies, who soared and plummeted through the bestseller lists in the space of a couple of ...”

“... generals are said to have been horrified when Sargent opened Thayer’s valise. According to Richard Murray of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the prototype garment resembled an old hunting jacket, trailing strips of coloured cloth and daubed with patches of colour that reflected Thayer’s interest in harlequin costumes. It’s not clear whether ...”

“... years before and a French auteur a few years before that; but the critics were madder still that Richard Linklater had dared to make a film about Jean-Luc Godard. Even worse, a narrative film about the shoot of Jean-Luc Godard’s À bout de souffle, considered one of the all-time greats. I didn’t find it sacrilegious, but it was a bit much watching the ...”

“... about politics. It’s interesting in this context to look at two figures who grew up and began to read and think for themselves in an Ireland freed from the energy that Parnell absorbed, a time when Ireland was more open to darting shifts and suggestions. Both Patrick Pearse and James Joyce had fathers who believed passionately in what Parnell had ...”

“... admirers, Hannah Arendt pointed out that both his followers and his detractors seemed to have read only the first chapter – also entitled ‘On Violence’ – of The Wretched of the Earth. There Fanon described how violence could serve as a ‘cleansing force’ for the colonised, liberating them not only from their colonial masters, but from their ...”

“... whose splen did Mystical Bedlam used the casebooks of the astrological physician and divine Richard Napier to illuminate the mental world of the 17th century, and to suggest that mental alienation and distress might then have been dealt with in surprisingly sympathetic ways, joined in the chorus of condemnation of the ‘medical brutality’ which ...”

“... fiction of Elie Wiesel to George Steiner’s ruminations in In Bluebeard’s Castle and Richard Rubenstein’s The Cunning of History. But to insist on the uniqueness of the event is a short step to insisting on the exclusiveness of interpretation which asserts an empathetic privilege and even a Jewish proprietorship in the subject. Seven years ...”

“... a Mod, a hippy and a Buddhist; he’d called himself Davie Jones, David Jay and David Bowie (after Richard Widmark’s portrayal of Jim Bowie in The Alamo, though he pronounces it the southern English way, the first syllable rhyming with ‘snow’ rather than ‘shoe’ or ‘cow’). Whatever it took. One of the things Trynka’s biography makes clear is ...”

“... a whirling dervish, she lost the thread of one existence and found another.’ It’s as if Sir Richard Burton had set out to write a Mills and Boon romance. Brick Lane truly comes alive only when its male characters, particularly the older ones, enter the fray. This isn’t just because they are more gabby and engaged, less likely to be sitting at home ...”

“... Did the United States invade Iraq with this objective in mind? The leader of the study group was Richard Perle, who became head – now, after press disclosure of a conflict of interest, he is a mere member – of the Defense Policy Board under Donald Rumsfeld. Another member of the study group was Douglas Feith, now the Pentagon’s Under Secretary for ...”

“... inequalities we have presented may have been shocking.’ In fact, no one who takes the trouble to read this report is liable to be shocked, especially if, as is likely, they have paid attention to the discussion of recent studies such as Polly Toynbee and David Walker’s Unjust Rewards (2008) or Kate Pickett and ...”

“... reality.’ The ‘theory’ he has in mind was developed in the early 1990s by Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and others at the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), calling for the US to increase military spending and to target rogue states (Iraq, Iran and North Korea) pre-emptively, as well as to develop missile defence and a new generation of ...”

“... the entry code. It’s as if you’ve been shoved onstage, without lines, in a play you’ve never read. Smile brightly. Bluff like a politician in a glass booth being manipulated by semaphoring black-suited attendants with clipboards. So? ‘All for the best in the best of all possible Londons,’ says the mayor, says the minister, says Joanna Lumley. ‘All ...”