“... Lyndon Johnson and not Kennedy, Ford and not Nixon, or even that there was nobody in the White House at all – as under Reagan. In short, a strong economy and great power can be politically almost foolproof, just as, conversely, there are limits to what pure talent and leadership can achieve, as every military historian knows. Rommel was beaten by ...”

“... he must first convince himself. The first experiment that convinced Florey and his two colleagues, Norman Heatley and Ernst Chain, that they might be on to something occurred very shortly alter the German Army– ‘to the inexplicable surprise of the Allied Command – instead of dashing themselves to pieces on the Maginot line, drove their Panzer columns ...”

“... milk-stained by the sun. From the window of the hotel I could see a distant church tower in Norman style, so I walked toward it. Built in 1957, it was not as old as it looked. Above the door was an unusually small black-and-white photograph of our host, Saddam Hussein, the President or Rais of Iraq, indicating (I ...”

“... subjects, too, were precisely of the period: Godard and Resnais, the Marat/Sade, Genet, Pavese, Norman O. Brown and Happenings. In this posthumous collection written four decades later, the literary pieces have hardly changed, the writers she applauds are still largely European, though of the past rather than the present, and her wholehearted admiration for ...”

“... denigrated A Walk on the Wild Side, he was brought near to suicide by the reviews. Always drawn to white male redemption through black love, Algren had originally called Golden Arm by the title Beauvoir used in their correspondence, ‘The Dealer and the High Yellow’. He had succumbed to the publisher’s pressure and made the prostitute Molly-O a ...”

“... Leopold hoped to transform children like Makulo into mindele ndombe, ‘black white men’. Church and Force Publique worked hand in hand to produce mindele ndombe and to ensure that Congo’s resources were extracted to Leopold’s satisfaction. The king was a shareholder in the companies that were given mining concessions, and benefited ...”

“... when she first saw him on holiday in Milan in 1957. ‘Dressed in immaculately pressed jeans, white shirt, a blue V-neck pullover and a Jaeger slimline bow tie ... he represented everything that the English students ... knew they were not.’ It was not just a matter of appearance. Although formal education failed him – he found his identity in a gang ...”

“... women and children at Deir Yassin in April 1948 was the only incident of its kind. In fact, as Norman Finkelstein makes clear, the Israelis committed at least twenty large-scale massacres of Palestinians (more than fifty killed in each) as well as about a hundred smaller ones. Finkelstein’s book is both an impressive analysis of Zionist ideology and a ...”

“... keeping’. Bishop Wordsworth, great-nephew of the poet, is commemorated by George Frampton in white marble, supine, fingers intertwined as though sleeping off a heavy lunch. He is almost as dead as the supposedly living figures painted by Frampton’s son, Meredith, now in the Tate’s collection. They are minutely detailed simulacra of humans that look ...”

“... Khomeini’s idea of justice and sympathise with his call for the death of Salman Rushdie. Norman Tebbit would doubtless use it for immigrants who fail what he called the cricket test (‘Which side do they cheer for?’). Yet the Israeli-American connection is fraught with particular emotional and political significance. Israel, for a start, grants to ...”

“... on Fridtjof Nansen’s diaries, he is building on Mallarmé, who was before him in seeing the white and virgin unwritten page as a snowfield. But he goes beyond the Frenchman, for in Graham’s snowfield there are crevasses. A writer’s language has its way with him. A lot turns on how he reacts to this condition, once it is brought home to ...”

“... in her. Things changed in the 20th century. Indeed, the modern age has overturned the assertion of White Kennet, an early 18th-century bishop of Peterborough, that ‘Qu. Elizabeth had a Camden, and King Charles a Clarendon, but poor James I has had I think none but paltry scribblers.’ The rise of the historical novel and the popular biography has produced a ...”

“... Professor Duby confines his attention to the main source for William’s life, a poem in Norman French of some twenty thousand lines commissioned by his son and written a few years after William’s death. The personal memoirs of William – for it is as such that he treats the text – are those, otherwise hardly accessible, of the knightly classes ...”

“... valuable and what isn’t, the Council’s main concern is of course with cash. Out of office, Norman St John-Stevas would say that government provision for the arts was wholly inadequate: in office, he reduced that provision. Lord Gowrie, better attuned to his party’s mood, was so far from thinking the grant inadequate that he cut it again and ...”

“... a pea below her twenty mattresses is hurting her. A prince is metamorphosed from a frog (the poet Norman MacCaig used to say it would be even better if a frog metamorphosed from a prince). Wordsworth, feeling he had to deplore the increasingly moralistic instruction of the young, refers in The Prelude to those ‘guards and wardens’ who would ‘control all ...”