“... the agency would be far better off killing, rather than jailing, terror suspects.’ According to John Rizzo, a career CIA lawyer, Obama officials ‘never came out and said they would start killing people because they couldn’t interrogate them, but the implication was unmistakable … Once the interrogation was gone, all that was left was the ...”

“... I looked fat, dull and unmanly. The achievements of others, particularly those of my older brother John, stood in for anything that I might achieve myself, and afterwards a series of distinguished men were to step into John’s shoes. I acquired a spectacular ability to not see, identify or shrewdly evaluate people or ...”

“... off Bonnie and Clyde – went to see him in The Indian Wants the Bronx in which he appeared with John Cazale, who would play Fredo in The Godfather. The first performances of The Indian Wants the Bronx were in a venue so tiny that the audience had to walk across the stage to reach the exit. But then it moved to a venue off Broadway, which is where Dunaway ...”

“... to marry them. In Lichfield, the geographical centre of Middle England, a statue of Captain Edward John Smith of the Titanic stands in a park bestowing dangerous blessings on newly-wed couples emerging from the nearby register office. In McKie’s version of England the past is generally not allowed to assert itself as a moral yardstick, a measure of decline ...”

“... rival for class valedictorian. She introduced him to her favourite English poets: Sidney, Spenser, John Clare. When he was unhappy at Dartmouth (he found all the hazing and fraternity business childish), he buried himself in Palgrave’s Golden Treasury.He had begun writing verse by the time he dropped out and returned home in November 1892, having lasted less ...”

“... himself as a ‘biographer of the American establishment’. He’d made his career writing about John J. McCloy, the ‘chairman’ of postwar US foreign policy; the Bundy brothers, architects of the Vietnam War; J. Robert Oppenheimer; Jimmy Carter. Cohn often figured in his work, but only in passing – an ‘annoying and obstructive minor player’, not ...”

“... Mediterranean and the Danube basin were for a long time privileged zones – the terrains of St John Philby and Robert Byron, of Norman Douglas and Patrick Leigh-Fermor, of R.W.Seton-Watson and Rebecca West. Sorties farther afield – like Peter Fleming’s expeditions to the Gobi or Matto Grosso – were fewer. Paradoxically, the vast expanse of the Empire ...”

“... making a patronising show of it, and stayed to tell a good story about Christopher Hill and John Sparrow, and of how he’d been the unwitting agent of a quarrel between them, while ignoring an ambitious and possessive American professor who kept yelling ‘Eye-zay-ah! Eye-zay-ah!’ from across the room. (‘Yes,’ he murmured at the conclusion of the ...”

“... as the ranks of veterans proceeded up Whitehall wearing bowler hats and medals. And he persuaded a major record company to release a performance of it by the band of a Guards regiment. It was a habit of his to quote out of nowhere and out of context the lines from Henry V, ‘In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man/As modest stillness and humility’, and ...”

“... McCabe and Dermot Bolger constitutes a ‘new direction in Irish fiction’ is less certain. The major trope of Irish fiction is certainly no longer Modernist paralysis but change – Tóibín’s second novel, The Heather Blazing, is a very good example of this. But, as the novel also shows, that change still turns on the contradictions that lay at the ...”

“... have always been an integral part of the power game. Saviano says that his father ‘adored Pope John Paul II’ and was hugely impressed by the numbers who listened to him and the power this brought. ‘All the powerful kneeled before him. For my father this was enough to admire a man.’ With the sales of Gomorrah running into millions and its author ...”

“... had to back-translate FitzGerald’s quatrains into Persian. Baron Corvo did a version; Augustus John supplied the images for a translation into Romany Welsh. More recently, W.G. Sebald searched out FitzGerald’s grave in the churchyard in the village of Boulge in Suffolk, and, in the same way that FitzGerald chose to speak through Omar Khayyám, Sebald ...”

“... be a precursor of Hobbes’s Leviathan – that other ‘confusion of a man and a whale’, as John Bramhall (one of Hobbes’s early critics) described it – and Hobbes, who knew Donne, may have had the poet’s image in mind. Bramhall almost certainly did, taking Donne’s account of the conspiracy of the swordfish and the thresher fish against the ...”

“... be altered to follow not what actually happened, but what ought to have done. Surely (in Ragtime) John Pierpont Morgan might have invited Henry Ford to lunch to talk about reincarnation; and why wouldn’t the anarchist Emma Goldman have given a full-body massage to the society divorcée Evelyn Nesbit (accompanied by a lecture on sexual politics)? These lines ...”

“... these days, but it’s quiet enough. ‘I think I need to hold off a bit before we listen to the C major,’ the Maestro says, at the end of Bach’s D minor Partita for solo violin, recorded by Nathan Milstein in the mid-1950s. ‘And that’s with one “l”,’ he growls. The Maestro likes to growl. He has a generally kind nature which can turn choleric at ...”