“... The President finally decided he couldn’t remember what he had or hadn’t signed. Regan may think he and Reagan shared a relationship to Iran/Contra of amnesia, ignorance and inattention, but Regan was not the President’s fairy godfather who aided the Contras and sold arms to Iran. That figure was Reagan’s ‘national hero’, Lieutenant-Colonel ...”

“... is a way of abdicating from the inexpressible mode of being that it also sustains. The clarity may be illusory, but the Romantic dawn and the Age of Reason unite to give it a great and naive confidence, so that the reader feels it is trembling on the verge of some great revelation, some breakthrough about the state of the universe and man’s nature. As ...”

“... murderer, Mr Wrong, are sorted out. There’s an Incident at Owl Creek-like ending in which Mary may be executed, or reborn, or returned by time-loop to the novel’s opening situation. Other People, this is to say, does not easily give up its secret – at least not to me. Amis’s cleverness has always been of the kind which makes the clodhopping reader ...”

“... the University of Hull, across the river from his home town. There, supported by colleagues like Richard Hoggart and Philip Larkin, he founded Critical Quarterly, a journal which continues to appeal to a mixed audience of schoolteachers and professional academics. After a year at Berkeley, during which his classes were disrupted by the Free Speech ...”

“... the nakedness of his wife. Genitals must be washed before and after intercourse. And in no case may a young man study religious law during the sexual act. Indeed if there are religious books in the bedroom, they must be carefully covered with two cloths before the woman enters. Sexual intercourse must take place on a bed with mattress, sheet and blanket ...”

“... you see it,’ and one obvious sign for it is a child who goes ‘wrong’. You and your mother may not agree about good mothering, but if you didn’t turn out all that well yourself, if you are an alcoholic, or have personality problems, if you are anorexic, or a juvenile delinquent, a killer, a schizophrenic, or if you died in your cot from Sudden Infant ...”

“... constitutional revolution’: ‘“we the people” – to use a long-coined phrase that may finally become currency in Britain – have changed, especially in our relationship to authority.’ The idea of the book is unobjectionable: it asks what last May’s General Election ‘really tells us; explores the ...”

“... checked by the executive, as that is again by the legislative; all parts moving, and however they may follow the particular interests of their body, yet all uniting at last for the public good.’ No sign here of the tyrant denounced by Thomas Jefferson in the more vituperative passages of the Declaration of Independence. All this goes to support Roberts’s ...”

“... there in 1878. She went to seek respite from her passionate but unconsummated love affair with Richard Doughty-Wylie (nephew of the great explorer Charles Doughty), whom she had met when he was British Consul in Konya. Doughty-Wylie was married, and was not prepared to risk his career by leaving his wife. A man with physical courage to match ...”

“... ever have occurred to us, had we not learned them from TV? Some years ago, I met the photographer Richard Avedon when he came to take a group portrait of some Scottish writers in a Glasgow bar. By chance, I had recently been to see his retrospective exhibition, Evidence, at the National Portrait Gallery, and had become almost obsessed by the series of ...”

“... necessary. The poor bloody infantry also deserves recognition and historical commemoration. This may seem a back-handed way of paying tribute to the work of George Peden, whose iron-clad research in the public records has established him as the leading authority on the 20th-century Treasury, which long served as the butt of much of Keynes’s criticism of ...”

“... lost, and the reasons for its getting lost are part of the film. Introducing the film at Cannes in May 1979, Coppola said it wasn’t about Vietnam: it was Vietnam. By Vietnam he didn’t mean the country in South-East Asia, he meant what ‘Vietnam’ nearly always means in post-1970s American English: the historical moment when Americans met themselves in a ...”

“... Richard Holmes published Shelley: The Pursuit in 1974. More than a decade later, in Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer (1985), he recalled how obsessive his engagement gradually became, not just with Shelley, but with that whole group of English expatriates associated with him, as it moved from Geneva through Italy – Bagni di Lucca, Este, Venice, Rome, Naples, Ravenna, Pisa – shedding some members and adding others, before finally disintegrating when Shelley and Edward Williams were drowned off Leghorn in July 1822 ...”

“... grim and containing shots of what the censor called ‘actual’ sex, which I saw on 12 May 2000 as an alternative to Gladiator. François Truffaut, the patron saint of this weirdo sub-type, said that no child, on being asked to name their dream, replies: ‘I’m going to be a movie reviewer.’ He was wrong.The beginning of my obsession coincided ...”

“... exporting of equipment, technologies of torture and bad lieutenants. To take one instance, Richard Zuley, a specialist at Guantánamo, had become reassuringly ruthless while working for a Chicago police unit that for decades interrogated predominantly African-Americans at so-called black sites. It’s only now, with a white supremacist ensconced in the ...”