“... There had also been calls from these phones near the site of the kidnapping in the weeks before it took place (there were signs that the area had been staked out). This complicated phone trail eventually led to a man called Robert Lady. Lady was the CIA’s man in Milan, formally a US vice-consul, but well known to the police as a spy. He was so in love with ...”

“... it easier to swim all the way from the Lido to Venice and up the Grand Canal to his palazzo; and took pride in the fact that he was then still quite hale enough to eat a ‘piece’ and retire to bed with Boccaccio and ‘a black-eyed Venetian girl’. On that occasion he had been competing in the swim with a bachelor friend, Alexander Scott, and the ...”

“... When Mussolini​ took power after the March on Rome in October 1922, few thought he would hold office for long. Giovanni Amendola, a Liberal deputy first elected in 1919, failed to oppose the confidence vote on the new government. King Victor Emmanuel III had capitulated to the fascists, but Amendola had faith in Italy’s constitution and the strength of its democratic institutions ...”

“... notch. I, meanwhile ... I was going to say I had squandered spring when summer came along and took it from me like a terrier a lady has asked one to hold for a moment while she adjusts her stocking in the mirror of a weighing machine. But here it is winter, and wrong to speak of other seasons as though they exist. Time only has an agenda in that wallet at ...”

“... whereby we are enabled to test reasons’. This was a science which, Peirce was to argue, contra John Stuart Mill and others, must have nothing to do with psychology but be purely formal, with the task of classifying the products of thought, not of investigating the manner of thought’s production. As the study of validity in argument or inference, logic ...”

“... and one 17th-century trader recalled that an argument she had witnessed the previous summer took place ‘when Wall Nutts came just in season, and black Cherrys were going out’. Around Lord Mayor’s Day on 9 November, there was a crush at London’s docks for the first sprats of the season; these little fish were wholesome, cheap and tasty – one ...”

“... if Roland Barthes was hostile to the neighbourly image of the Author as an extra-textual being, he took pleasure in the thought of himself returning as a biographical subject (i.e. object) once he was dead. In the Preface to Sade, Fourier, Loyola, he laid down the quite meetable conditions under which he would agree to pass into the hands of futurity: ‘Were ...”

“... Like the October Revolution, the August Putsch took place (or failed to take place) in a few confined areas, mainly of the capital city. The only possible target outside Moscow would have been the Leningrad (soon to be St Petersburg) Soviet. Moscow was the key, as St Petersburg (soon to be Leningrad) had been 74 years before; and as the whole world now knows, it was the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Federation, a big white slab of a Seventies construction on the Moscow River, which had to be knocked out ...”

“... tiny island, he encountered a man who disturbed him, a sign which disturbed him, and a woman who took his breath away. Finally the woman departed, leaving Stone feeling for her with all his heart and soul, and the interesting thing is that before this Final adventure he was well nigh convinced he possessed neither heart nor soul nor memory of them. It would ...”

“... have brought together a formidable trio of scholars, Campbell himself, Patrick Wormald and Eric John, to carve up the Anglo-Saxon age between them. Campbell has tackled the period from c. 350 AD to c. 660; Wormald from c. 660 to c. 900; and John from c. 900 to 1066. Other experts, several archaeologists and a ...”

“... in getting over her grief Lady Agnes once again showed spirit and resource. She went to London and took a humble job at a hospital, hoping to train as a nurse. While scrubbing floors one day, she was noticed by one of the consulting surgeons, Alfred Cooper, a specialist in bronchial and venereal diseases and a rising man in his profession. His was a typical ...”

“... assistant. A typical letter from Malone asks where he might find a particular prologue by Sir John Denham, wonders whether Warton has come across any mention of ‘Marocco’ (a famous acrobatic horse exhibited around Europe in the 1590s), enquires about any use of ‘the pun on Ajax and A-jakes previous to Sir ...”

“... like Joseph Heller and publish a novel every seven years or so, or a “brilliant” writer like John Gardner and write obscure books for bright academics who eat macrobiotic foods and drive old Saabs with faded but still legible GENE McCARTHY FOR PRESIDENT stickers on the rear bumpers.’ Instead of which he is the ‘King of Horror’ who had his face on ...”

“... Maclean and the ‘fifth man’ (‘revealed’ with too much fanfare by Andrew/Gordievsky), John Cairncross. These men, and others, performed prodigies of courage and treachery, yet their work was more often than not ignored, misinterpreted or brutally cut short. Sorge’s warnings were ignored by Stalin, clinging to his belief in Hitler’s word. Maly ...”

“... for the US Senate; wrote 17 more novels; lived to memorialise (in essays in this book) his friends John Kennedy, Tennessee Williams, Italo Calvino, Orson Welles, Eleanor Roosevelt, Anaïs Nin ... In this kind of summary Vidal’s life sounds almost comically glamorous and eventful. One of the secrets of his social and professional success lies in the ...”