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“... bombs went off all over the country in a spree that saw 120 dead. It was two years exactly since George W. Bush had announced that ‘major combat operations’ in Iraq were over, an anniversary marked that week with 17 co-ordinated bombings in Baghdad. May 2nd is the date of Joseph McCarthy’s death and J. Edgar Hoover’s. It is the date of Tony Blair’s ...”

“... of it is a film set, cranking out heritage for export: crinoline frolics and The Madness of King George. I’d barely set foot outside my first secondhand bookshop when I was pounced on by a two-person television crew doing a vox pop on the Dome. There was a man hefting a DVC camera and a woman with a clipboard. After a morning trying to tease a story from ...”

“... a very small proportion of Jews’, since there was little untilled soil except for stony hills or sand dunes. The Arabs, he added, were not ‘wild men of the desert’, and he warned that ‘if in the course of time the Jewish holding in the country develops to such an extent as to encroach in some degree on the native population, the latter will not easily ...”

“... take on this touchy matter is provided by Sinatra’s long-time (African-American) valet, George Jacobs. In his immensely entertaining memoir Mr S: The Last Word on Frank Sinatra (2003), he defends Sinatra and the other Rat Pack roustabouts, and says the only people he ever got a real nasty sizzle of racism from were a few Mafia bosses, and the ...”

“... we’re Americans.”’ And later I heard that I could buy a 12-inch ‘Elite Force Aviator: George W. Bush’ action figure: ‘Exacting in detail and fully equipped with authentic gear, this limited-edition action figure is a meticulous 1:6 scale re-creation of the commander-in-chief’s appearance during his historic aircraft carrier landing. This ...”

“... were trapped’. ‘I have two minor questions,’ she wrote. As usual, they have to do with my George Washington-handicap. I can’t tell a lie even for art, apparently; it takes an awful effort or a sudden jolt to make me alter facts. Shouldn’t it be a lobster town, and further on – where the bait, fish for bait, was trapped – (this is trivial, I ...”

“... him on active service – sitting on a rock eating from a mess can, pushing a jeep out of the sand, riding a camel – suggest a man most at peace with himself.Helen was left alone and adrift in Cairo in the white glare of summer, trying to avoid the ‘garbage, dung, stench and slander’ of the place, as ...”

“... American painter called Harvey Cohen (Edwin in Frame’s autobiography). Frame fell for his friend George Parlette (Bernard), who ‘laughed heartily and each time he laughed I felt … as if I were a vast empty palace awaiting the guests and the feast’. They had an affair and ate breakfast cakes, as well as corned beef that Reilly sent, along with notes ...”

“... for half a mile or more on the US side, an endless line of upright exhaust pipes beside a verge of sand, scrub and trash. This, too, is undergoing a major overhaul, largely to cope with the volume of traffic, but security is being tightened as well. Mariposa is the preferred point of deportation for illegal migrants: truck drivers, unlike the crowds of ...”

“... water concern. By October 1865, relations between Shewell and the town commissioners’ clerk, George Williams, an indefatigable opponent of the Mythe scheme, had reached the stage of open warfare. Yet in the cosy world of old-time west of England politics, nothing could stop Shewell. In November 1865 he came up for re-election as chairman of the ...”

“... the hall. If the film was a western, or a war film, another form of preview, which I loved, was a sand table that would be set out in the foyer of the cinema, re-creating the high sierras and canyons of some unknown land, or the battlefields of Flanders with their water-filled trenches and blasted trees, or the skies above them where fearless aviators were ...”

“... and with what! Stories of murder and mutilation! “Help,” cries the woman running along the sand at Miami Beach, “Help, my son the doctor is drowning!”’ Lenny Bruce’s material is much closer to Portnoy’s Complaint than Youngman’s or Berle’s, reason enough not to mention his name in the novel. But it’s odd that Roth Unbound invokes him ...”

“... there are all my mood-setting ‘highbrow’ CDs – the songs of Gerald Finzi, Vaughan Williams, George Butterworth, Gurney, Ernest Farrar. (The baritone Stephen Varcoe is unsurpassed in this repertoire.) I have but to hear the dark opening bars of Finzi’s ‘Only a Man Harrowing Clods’ to dissolve in sticky war nostalgia and an engorged, unseemly ...”

“... knows that what is good does not come automatically. That may require an army. A Napoleon. Or a George W. Bush. A price must be paid if we want human rights to spread. We should not blame Napoleon for using violence, but for not going far enough. Napoleon’s mistake was that he employed freedom and equality as symbols to help his army win battles rather ...”