“... was faking messages from missing British liaison officers to keep up morale at home. SOE personnel may not have perfected their skills in duplicity – ‘love and kisses’ – but they were giving it their best shot. Shortly, secret services on both sides of the Iron Curtain would hone the arts of lying. Thompson died in early June, but it wasn’t until 21 ...”

“... Rossetti in 1871, it became his sole property and permanent home later. In 1938 his daughter May left it to the University on certain conditions, but her wills were a mess and in the end the University let it furnished on condition that it should be open to members of the University and Morris-students. I had never been there; it is near Lechlade on the ...”

“... control. ‘Elite rule is an inevitable by-product of secrecy,’ the American political scientist Robert Dahl noted in 1953. ‘Those who effectively influence policy can scarcely exceed the number of those who possess the information to act.’ Yet democratically elected governments have always marked out things their own citizens are not allowed to ...”

“... mood was infectious among the personnel in charge of exterminating the brutes. The Atlantic’s Robert Kaplan cheerfully reported that ‘Welcome to Injun Country’ was the refrain among American soldiers worldwide. The primal blood-lusts of the war on terror survived Obama’s renaming of it. The Seal Team that in 2011 eventually scalped Osama bin Laden ...”

“... that his preferences and impatiences seldom disturb any reader not out for a quarrel. We may doubt on principle that Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry (1926) could be ‘completely objective’ in its depictions, but our guide’s belief in the validity of a neutral authorial stance allows him to get close to a practical transparency – not a bad trait ...”

“... does not love me’ written in pencil, to name just a few of the 576 lots that were auctioned – may represent the most interesting event to occur in contemporary art since the death of Andy Warhol. Indeed it takes Warhol’s deification of celebrity past its absurdly logical conclusion: why pay more for a representation of Marilyn Monroe, even an Abstract ...”

“... books to the poetry of T.S. Eliot, from the Baedeker to the Bible. The works of other novelists may prove, as the phrase would have it, more humanly satisfying than his, but Pynchon chooses to use his immense talents as a writer and encyclopedist to show why he cannot offer satisfactions of that kind. His jaunty complaints in the Introduction that the ...”

“... of history does not exempt him from repeating it. A more vivid proof, not mentioned by Butler, may be found in Ginsberg’s recent echoes of the totalitarian apologetics offered by some of the Modernists of the 1920s and 1930s. Ginsberg has placed his spiritual life in the care of a Tibetan guru (one consciously avoided by the Dalai Lama), the autocrat of ...”

“... tide. Marchand has immensely enlarged our knowledge of Byron the man, but some of the elucidations may be plunging critics of Byron the poet into further disarray. In a clutch of new studies of Byron, it is bound to be the biography that has it easiest. It is a story set glamorously among rich and famous people, and spiced with sex, scandal and more sex. Even ...”

“... capital to be raised by a candidate who exploited the resentment engendered by defeat. (He may have had in mind the efficacy of the ‘who lost China?’ fantasy of the Fifties, but I don’t think that the ‘stab in the back’ psychosis of his German boyhood can have been far from his mind either.) At all events, the year 1968 found him advising the ...”

“... a borrower, such as The Sayings of the Desert Fathers, which she leafs through in her lunch break, may seed her thoughts with an apposite citation: ‘A time is coming when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him, saying, “You are mad, you are not like us.”’ There seems to be no way of encompassing catastrophe, but ...”

“... the Earl of Essex for treason in 1601 when the earl’s antagonist, the queen’s leading minister Robert Cecil, secretly present in the court, stepped from behind an arras to deliver the impassioned speech that ruined the earl’s defence of his rebellion? Which of the assumptions of disguise by beleaguered or lovelorn dramatis personae can have been as ...”

“... does bring to mind a quotation from the only song by David Byrne for which it finds space: ‘You may ask yourself/Well, how did I get here?’How did we get here? What can the history of books of quotations tell us about what they’re now expected to contain? As everybody knows, ‘there is no new thing under the sun’ (Ecclesiastes 1:9, often quoted as ...”

“... missiles and bombers should target enemy nuclear forces rather than cities. Counterforce may appear sane when compared with the lunatic destruction favoured by previous plans, but the new proposals were potentially no less deadly: should the negotiations that were supposed to accompany strikes on missile installations and airfields fail, the ...”

“... hub of the Scottish Folk Revival’. Instead, he seeks to establish him as a ‘genius’ who may have embraced whisky as a kind of sacrament. ‘It may well be,’ he said in the long obituary he wrote for the Guardian at the time of Henderson’s death in March 2002, ‘that the new Scotland – with its ...”