“... than as a discourse in its own right; it is touched on substantively only once, in a neat chapter (Anthony Vidler) on Chateaubriand and the ‘Gothic Revival’, or that medievalising frame of mind which was to be a precondition of French Romanticism. The New History incorporates also the kinds of writing that have long fed off and into ...”

“... suddenly pervaded the place. I could feel it stabbing through me. This was the CIGS. Thus Anthony Powell brilliantly evokes the dynamic personal impact of General Sir Alan Brooke in his novel The Military Philosophers. Brooke held positions of critical responsibility and as CIGS was titular head of the Army for the greater part of the Second World ...”

“... to be at least partly fictional (A Rock and a Hard Place: One Boy’s Triumphant Story by ‘Anthony Godby Johnson’, The Heart Is Deceitful above All Things by ‘J.T. LeRoy’, Kathy’s Story by Kathy O’Beirne), people felt aggrieved. They didn’t want imagined misery: no matter the quality of the imagination, they wanted experienced misery as ...”

“... like that. A later reference is not quite so emphatically positivistic: To cheer ourselves [in West Africa] we used to hunt cockroaches by the light of electric torches, marking in pencil on the walls one point for a certain death, half a point it the roach had been washed down the lavatory bowl. I described this pursuit later in The Heart of ...”

“... of day begin to drowse. The rookeries are emptying, and their birds of prey making wing to the West End. Dollymops, cracksmen and gonophs are on the prowl. Susan (up from Mrs Sucksby’s kitchen in the Borough) and Caroline (one of Mrs Castaway’s girls in St Giles) will hunt together tonight. Caroline is on the game, an alley-cat who’ll lift her ...”

“... Emily Leider, who has already distinguished herself by writing the definitive book on Mae West, had a ‘slightly cauliflowered’ left ear. Most photographs hide this ear, as did his protective cinematographers, so I must struggle to imagine it. If I were to write a brief memoir about my relation to Valentino or to his legacy, I might entitle it ...”

“... a half billion people on the earth … sixty million of them right here in California’. The US West Coast has been afflicted with a vicious Mucosa plague – a malady reminiscent of the encephalitis which has sent insecticide helicopters whirring above New York for the last two summers. Air-conditioning, the American addiction to perfect frigidity, has ...”

“... of New York Harbor, the ‘windowed cliffs’ of lower Manhattan brilliantly alight when you bank west on the approach to Newark at night. During the day you can see the cloverleafs, storage tanks and freight yards, the shopping centres and clusters of homes. Heading over the western edge of Jersey, you pass over the Great Swamp and the headwaters of the ...”

“... only three days, he escaped from a lawyer’s office in New Brunswick at the age of 17 and headed west to Calgary, where he ran a bowling alley. There, in Williams’s words, he learned ‘knowledge of how a grandee looked and behaved, and more to the immediate point, of the advantages of insider information as a sure way of making money’. Soon he was ...”

“... is more direct: ‘Erected to the memory of the heroes … Stephen Decatur Parish, James West Hadnot, Sidney Harris, who fell in the Colfax Riot fighting for White Supremacy, April 13, 1873.’ When EJI arrived in Montgomery there were more than fifty memorials of one sort or another to the glories of the Confederacy. They included a gold star on the ...”

“... than about what to do once they had. Lenin’s success and the subsequent failures to the west, especially in Germany, exercised them further, for their standard suppositions were turned upside down. Capitalism might not be a necessary condition of socialism at all. Indeed, it might impede it. Moreover, the new Soviet state had its own vertiginous ...”

“... unawares; it took one division six weeks to get from a base in eastern Iran to the theatre in the west. A few days after he heard about the invasion, Hossein Kharrazi commandeered two buses and took his men to Ahwaz. They were not members of the regular Army, but had joined a volunteer corps called the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) which Khomeini ...”

“... an admirer of German Romanticism and 17th-century painting, a reimaginer of such figures as Anthony Blunt and Paul de Man, and a frequent raider of mathematics and cosmology, Banville is – no question – one of the fancy boys, sometimes verging on being a clever-clever darling. (‘As one of your most darkly glowing luminants has observed’ is the ...”

“... it in a movie? Almost all the big stars lived in choicer parts of the city, in Beverly Hills or West LA, the canyons or Pacific Palisades. But in the decade of his major work, starting in 1947, Ryan kept a certain distance from the rest. And he was unusual in other ways: during the McCarthy years, together with his wife, Jessica, he founded a progressive ...”

“... superstition and intolerance.In March 1706, in the midst of the War of the Spanish Succession, Anthony Ashley Cooper, third earl of Shaftesbury, wrote excitedly to the Swiss biblical scholar Jean Le Clerc. ‘There is,’ he declared, ‘a mighty light which spreads itself over the world, especially in those two free nations of England and Holland, upon ...”