“... said: ‘No, I haven’t.’ When the audience began to laugh, Armstrong beamed back at them. He may have appeared remote, but that scene, which appears in Moon Launch Live, shows how easily he could establish a rapport. ‘Silence is a Neil Armstrong answer,’ his wife, Janet, once said. ‘The word “no” is an argument.’ Also: ‘I’m not married to ...”

“... signal the intimation of half-thoughts, shadowy promptings of a kind that only a first-rate writer may catch in words. There is a scene early in The Shopworn Angel where he sits in a taxi beside Margaret Sullavan, a soldier accepting a lift from a posh woman, speaking softly partly because he is shy of her beauty but also because he feels in the wrong: she is ...”

“... lending, or borrowing as the case might be. When The Closing of the American Mind first came out, Robert Paul Wolff, then a professor of philosophy at Amherst, wrote a short review in Academe, the journal of the American Association of University Professors. Let me quote from his prescient opening staves: Aficionados of the modern American novel have learned ...”

“... but not seen. It would have been much improved by a stronger sense of context, for while Brown may be largely lost to us as a knowable individual he is not entirely so. The few papers tell us something, and the circumstances of his life and work might be pieced together convincingly enough to describe in outline the qualities of the man who was able to ...”

“... by the Irgun in the newspaper version of Land of Black Gold when the Germans invaded Belgium in May 1940. Hergé drove to France with his wife, sister-in-law, niece and Siamese cat, which according to Peeters he sometimes took for walks on a lead. Leopold III surrendered on 27 May; placed under house arrest in his palace ...”

“... Soviet Union was as much founded in the work of the 19th-century poetic realists Lewis Carroll and Robert Louis Stevenson as in that of the 19th-century prosaic fantasists Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ – but he would have been hard put to point to the aspects of fantasy in the works of ‘Marx, that old shaman’, the overwhelming majority of which were ...”

“... by Tamara de Lempicka from 1933 – and Yvonne George, a Belgian cabaret star who swept the poet Robert Desnos off his feet. Members of the Brigade des moeurs were biddable, and liked to get a slice of the action, whatever it happened to be. They didn’t have much in the way of convictions, in any sense, especially when it came to pornography and drugs. The ...”

“... would have led. As it was, the 1830s would see O’Connell in alliance with the Whigs, a link that may have moderated his course as effectively as Parnell’s combination with the Gladstonian Liberals between 1886 and 1890. The failure of the next great popular movement, to ‘repeal’ the Union, and the rise of romantic nationalism in the Young Ireland ...”

“... that was it. A stock vision of undergraduates then (gleaned from movies like A Yank at Oxford with Robert Taylor) was of a young man in dressing-gown and slippers, a towel round his neck en route for the distant baths. I didn’t run to a dressing-gown and slippers either: ‘Nobody’ll mind if you just wear your raincoat,’ my mother reassuringly said. I ...”

“... new Northern Ireland Assembly rejected a motion denouncing power-sharing by 44 votes to 28, on 14 May 1974, the Ulster Workers’ Council announced that the Loyalists would reduce electricity output. The next day they called a general strike, and roadblocks appeared everywhere. Trimble played a significant role in the organisation of the strike, and appears ...”

“... than U-235), it is very unlikely that it could have made it small enough for missile delivery. It may be able to deliver a weapon from a plane, but given the air superiority of the US this is not a significant threat. Far more real is the DPRK’s ability to threaten a conventional artillery attack on Seoul, where more than ten million people live. This kind ...”

“... the marriage was far from lacking in love. There were times when Hetta’s exercise of her freedom may have caused Empson some pain; he missed her badly when she went off to Hong Kong for a year with a lover, and seems to have been a little unhappy when she added illegitimately to the family (possibly, as Haffenden suggests, more because of his sense of ...”

“... the whole thing in a proper chronological order, not like this mish-mash I’m making you.’ He may only be a literary construct, but his instincts are sound. Postmodernism as Chabon practises it is a laminate of uncertainty and overconfidence, a formula for taking risks that is actually pretty safe. Think the jumbled chronology works? Great. Think it ...”

“... interest is often key to the appearance of a writer’s work in another language; it may make their fortune: Anthea Bell (Englishing Sebald) and Ann Goldstein (voicing Elena Ferrante) propelled the authors to cult status beyond their own shores. Like a shrub moved to a sunnier position, writers may thrive when ...”

“... of all the ministers of death’, and its preferred targets were children. In the past, you may have had something like a one in three chance of getting the disease and, if you did get it, a one in five chance of dying, though some outbreaks killed 50 per cent of the afflicted. Now smallpox is no more. In 1980, the World Health Organisation declared it ...”