“... attitudes, are fairly hysterical. The professional shark-hater and shark-killer Captain William E. Young remarked in his 1934 memoir Shark! Shark! that the very word summons up a powerful mental image of a cold-blooded rover of the deep, its huge mouth filled with razor-sharp teeth, swimming ceaselessly night and day in search of anything that might fall into ...”

“... theory. The new book’s jacket image, a striking black and white photo by John Sadovy, shows a young man almost literally biting the dust. Only after turning the book over to look at the back does one notice his presumed killer, reloading his rifle. This example already poses questions beyond the ken of liberal orthodoxy. The dead man, a member of the ...”

“... at Owen’s College in Manchester, ‘what kinds of habits &c I had to overcome when I was young & thinking of speaking to others.’ But he took pains to learn, and to fashion a suitable character for his performances. Dignified, unostentatious, unforced, he became the handsome, masculine face of Victorian public science, a gentleman who could command ...”

“... A senior official told Scahill that Obama was ‘surprised and upset and wanted an explanation’. Robert Gibbs, a senior advisor to Obama, suggested that the boy wouldn’t have been killed if he’d had a ‘more responsible father’. A wrongful death suit against US officials for the death of both al-Awlakis and a third US citizen is pending. Scahill ...”

“... in order to prevent the further spread of communism in that theatre and, secondly, to test my young Luftwaffe at this opportunity in this or that technical respect.’ German armed forces personnel trained around 56,000 Nationalist troops, and at any one time there were around 10,000 Germans engaged in the war in some capacity on the ground; the total ...”

“... Communicated monthly, sit and stare At the new suburb stretched beyond the run-way Where a young man lands hatless from the air. The dashing new king’s arrival in London by aeroplane was widely reported and seen as a refreshing sign of modernity: here was a prince who was both a man of the people – of the desperate poverty he saw in Wales he said ...”

“... of other names in Montpellier and Périgueux. He was in a three-person cell that included a Jew, Robert Kirschen. In 1942, the Gestapo pounced on a Resistance network at the Maison de Chimie, and Kirschen’s younger brother André was among those arrested. André, at 15 the youngest of them, was the only one not shot, but in ‘compensation’, both his ...”

“... and Penthouse, with a script by Gore Vidal. It starred Malcolm McDowell as a convincingly bonkers young emperor, backed up by a group of A-list actors, including Gielgud and Helen Mirren, who were said to have been unaware of the soft porn enterprise in which they were involved. (Did they think that Guccione was bankrolling serious historical drama?) Much ...”

“... interval between the horrors of the first half of the 20th century. The title is borrowed from Robert Graves and Alan Hodge, whose social history of Britain from 1918 to 1939, The Long Weekend, appeared in 1940, and it conjures up a sepia image of a tranquil Indian summer ‘in which the sun set slowly on the British Empire and the shadows lengthened on ...”

“... did Helms introduce him to senior figures in the CIA, but he set up a meeting between Amit and Robert McNamara, then the defense secretary: McNamara found Amit’s arguments persuasive, and he conveyed them to Johnson the same evening. The president understood that Israel was going to act; he set up a special task force to handle the situation, headed by ...”

“... tradition alike (with more than a hundred pages of endnotes citing work by the likes of Tom Nairn, Robert Crawford and Brian Doyle), this is an examination of the writing produced across these islands during the crucial century between the accession of James VI of Scotland as James I of England in 1603 and the passage of the legislation that at last legally ...”

“... where, on a bed like theirs, two single beds yoked together to make a king-size, a man – rather young, to judge from the smoothness of his blond body, with its plump buttocks – lies upon his wife’s body as if attempting resuscitation or (not at all the same thing) concealment. When, under silent direction from the accompanying, officiating ...”

“... meticulous. At one end of the spectrum lurk the sex murderers in The Comfort of Strangers (1981), Robert and Caroline, whose actions lead their victim’s girlfriend to surmise that ‘the imagination, the sexual imagination’, embodies ‘a powerful single organising principle’ which distorts ‘all relations, all truth’. The incestuous children in The ...”

“... of this kind was the conviction that Pound had undergone a fundamental change of heart in Pisa. Robert Fitzgerald, reviewing the Pisan Cantos in the New Republic in August 1948, was glad to find the poet ‘for the first time expressing a personal desolation and a kind of repentance’. The trick was to imagine a desolation so extreme that, whatever Pound ...”

“... too, in the growing sleaze chronicled by Tom Bower. Although Bower has concentrated his efforts on Robert Maxwell and (the intimately connected) Geoffrey Robinson, many more are encompassed by the allegations he raises – it is not just a matter of Peter Mandelson but of Bernard Donoghue, Gordon Brown, Helen Liddell, Alistair Campbell and Charlie ...”