“... gaze flitted between Marie-José and Paz and her husband.The next encounter was definitive. It took place by chance in Paris, on the afternoon of 28 June 1964. Paz describes it in Viento Entero. In Paul Blackburn’s translation:              The fallen birdbetween rue Montalembert and rue de Bacis a girl              held ...”

“... an uproarious visit to Edinburgh and Glasgow by ‘sixteen French socialist workmen’, the orator John Bruce Glasier proclaimed: ‘We are hastening to reach the City of the Commune before night falls.’But as Forster points out, solidarity with Commune veterans on the part of British working-class movements was usually more symbolic than active. Plenty of ...”

“... he knew that would wreck his Presidential hopes as it had wrecked Russell’s. Until LBJ took the job, the Democratic Leader in the Senate was a figure of fun, the butt of jokes about impotence and irrelevance. The Leader had no way of making senators vote the way he wanted and nobody was keen to have the job. To do it properly you had to spend more ...”

“... reader, Simone de Beauvoir once wrote, has to be willing to follow the writer on her adventure. I took her advice, cleared my mind and tried to follow Cristina Campo on her journey. I was in for a shock: in these essays, Campo turned out to be a reactionary elitist. A dogmatic Catholic who hated the liberal reforms of Vatican II, a militant activist for the ...”

“... was a fixture of the Fulton Fish Market, subject of some of Mitchell’s best writing. Mitchell took all these projects seriously for a time. But the project that was connected most closely to his name during his final decades was a book variously described as a memoir of growing up in North Carolina, a small piece of which he actually wrote; or a book ...”

“... The voice on the phone was terrified and tearful. ‘I’m in such trouble, such trouble.’ It took me quite a while to get Josephine to say what had happened. She is the 18-year-old daughter of my domestic servant here in Johannesburg. Josephine, like her two sisters, is a boarder at a school near Pietersburg, 350 kilometres away ...”

“... human context, in the midst of a like-minded radical intelligentsia: William Frend, George Dyer, John Thelwall, Basil Montagu, John Tweddell, Felix Vaughan, James Losh, Joseph Fawcett. Roe’s research has been strenuous, his attention to detail earnest, and his book will be useful. But it will not be quite as useful as ...”

“... however, readily acknowledged by outsiders. My friends were kind; they wanted to help; and help took the fairly regular form of ringing me up to suggest a meeting. I have always felt vulnerable when answering the telephone, as if I were naked; indeed, sometimes I was naked when it rang. Cravenly, I fell in with any sociable plan that was proffered. This ...”

“... even of American involvement in it. It is, rather, the story of a collection of people whose paths took them an ocean away from home during a violent time.’ But this is too modest. His account – rather than history – of the war reaches far beyond the American fighters to recover its impact, month by month, on foreign visitors and journalists and on their ...”

“... the White House said, to lobbying by the powerful and unlikely duo of Henry Kissinger and Elton John. Nonetheless Amiel remains furious at the way she and Black have been treated and is intent on establishing his innocence on all counts. Her memoir is a bookend to his, A Matter of Principle, published in 2011, in which he praises her ‘constancy, resolve ...”

“... such as Michael Portillo and Peter Lilley and a strange breed of suburban Brylcreem boys – John Moore, Kenneth Baker, Jeffrey Archer and, pre-eminently, Cecil Parkinson. What they have in common is a dreadful smarminess, a smoothly blatant insincerity which apparently nothing can puncture – Baker’s own recent memoirs are one long purr of bland ...”

“... than Americans think they do and a great deal less than British people think Australians do. In John O’Grady’s poem ‘Integrated Adjective’, an Australian in a bar is overheard saying he’s been ‘Up at Tumba-bloody-rumba shootin’ kanga-bloody-roos’. The poet describes the integration of the group around the use of the inte-bloody-grated ...”

“... qualified would occupy the two highest offices. In 1796 this resulted in the winning candidate, John Adams of the Federalist party, ending up with Thomas Jefferson, leader of the opposition Republicans (not to be confused with today’s party), as vice president. Four years later, the Republican ticket consisted of Jefferson for president and Aaron Burr for ...”

“... their pretensions, caused him to be at best uneasily regarded by the run of his colleagues and he took care to ensure that no one ever mistook him for one of them. Having decided that difference was his natural lot, Santayana turned it to his advantage. He claimed to consider every topic, including the topics of philosophy, from outside the prevailing ...”

“... the advances in the physical and chemical techniques of the 1930s. The young scientist was John Kendrew, one of many inspired by such conversations to win the Nobel Prize, which escaped his travel companion. But it might have been anyone, male or female, who ever came within earshot of that stumpy, bohemian visionary genius with the uncontrollable head ...”