“... No lie, no British participation in the invasion. Oborne quotes Churchill’s reply in 1940 to a young rating on a battleship who asked him whether everything he told them was true: ‘Young man, I have told many lies for my country, and will tell many more.’ In wartime, and in sterling crises too, Oborne accepts that ...”

“... was born Stanley Martin Lieber. And the first issue of Superman was published, in 1938, by two young American Jews, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. As Michael Chabon wrote in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000), whose protagonists are loosely based on Siegel and Shuster: ‘Superman, you don’t think he’s ...”

“... this case of the French Ambassador’s secretary, Des Trappes. Also involved in this sham plot was Michael Moody, a former servant of Sir Edward Stafford’s in France and from the late 1580s an associate of Robert Poley, the veteran spy who was one of the men present at Marlowe’s death in Deptford. The early career of Thomas Drury seems to show us a ...”

“... Ford and Lewis, to the drowned worlds of J.G. Ballard and Will Self, the dystopian multiverses of Michael Moorcock and China Miéville. Fredric Jameson, considering postmodernism, talks about the ‘hysterical sublime’: a sort of Gothic rapture in contemplation of lastness, the voluntary abdication of power to superior aliens. This was heady stuff for my ...”

“... cannot imagine how the world of singers went on in the days when “Tara’s Halls”, and “The young May Moon”, and “The Meeting of the Waters”, were strains unborn.’ One of the clearest signs of how rapidly and how widely the song became popular is the inclusion of the Avoca Meeting on the tourist trail. The song and the place became popular ...”

“... is melancholy to think that any village community should have rated the sacrifice of ardent young lives so low that it was held that their adequate commemoration was achieved by a cross of Cornish design and granite sold in various sizes by large department stores.’There was no English or imperial tradition of monumental memorials, no exemplars such ...”

“... Two events of the last year have attracted a lot of notice. One is the production of Michael Hastings’s play, Tom and Viv, and the other the publication of Peter Ackroyd’s biography, T.S. Eliot. They of course share a subject, the poet himself. But this choice of subject, the life of the writer with perhaps the biggest public image of any in our time, suggests something else they have in common ...”

“... Theoria, his 15th book, and was critic for the Sunday Telegraph. For the death of a relatively young art critic there was a surprising amount of obituary and tribute: ‘surprising’ because the British press has little interest in art and art criticism – coverage offered in the mainstream press is usually in the hands of one of the arts editor’s ...”

“... on 78 records, 48 of them LPs. The compliments paid to him have been extravagant and impressive. Michael Foot sees resemblances to both Chaplin and Swift, describing him as ‘a comic genius’. The tribute is topped by Robert Graves, for whom Spike is ‘a great genius’. The Monty Python team are cited as finding him not just the original precursor of ...”

“... for Emily, his ‘Tall Girl’, retained all the shy ardour he felt when he first met her as a young student in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1912. She was a spur to his imagination, as he tested out new words for deep feeling, and the object of some comic erotic-spiritual exercises. Take this letter from December 1935: ‘When I go to bed I shall imagine ...”

“... laid the groundwork: at the time, academics at Michigan were doing important work in anthropology (Michael Taussig and Marshall Sahlins), political science (Archie Singham) and African American studies (Harold Cruse). Robinson’s wife and intellectual partner, Elizabeth, began graduate studies in anthropology there, while Robinson joined the politics ...”

“... people of all ages.’ Washington was the centre of this cultural revolution. A boom town for young single people in the 1930s and 1940s, it had a tight housing market, forcing men to bunk up with men, and offered women plentiful opportunities to support themselves by government jobs. What with the anonymous cruising sites of Lafayette Park (right in ...”

“... the terms in which Pamuk’s work has been celebrated by his admirers: ‘a plea for tolerance’, Michael McGaha calls it in his reverential study, Autobiographies of Orhan Pamuk,* while the Nobel committee praised Pamuk for being ‘committed to a cultural concept entirely based on understanding and respect for others’. Pamuk’s champions at times seem ...”

“... Private Lynndie England and others called ‘standard operating procedure’ (SOP). Children as young as ten years old were incarcerated: one of the tactics for nailing suspects was to kidnap their children and hold them hostage until their fathers turned themselves in. Abu Ghraib was situated in a war zone, contrary to international law; detainees were ...”

“... of great subtlety were allegedly revealed to Honinbo Jowa by ghosts, enabling him to defeat his young protégé Intetsu Akaboshi, who after four days of continuous play collapsed and coughed up blood, dying of TB shortly afterwards. Another, the Ear Reddening game, turned on a move of such strength that it caused a discernible flow of blood to the ears of ...”