“... by an arrogant ignorance of the land and people it was taking over. For 24 hours after the US army took control there was relative quiet, since the Baghdadis assumed they were under curfew. When they found they weren’t, wide-scale looting began. The looting of the Iraq Museum was a three-day affair, in which more than 15,000 items were stolen from public ...”

“... believe that the motive was sadism. Nor does he think, like Hitchcock’s first biographer, John Russell Taylor, that Hitchcock, far from enjoying the distress he was able to inflict on them, identified strongly with his victims. The women in the movies are, Wood proposes, ‘whatever we most fear to lose’. This ‘we’ may be just a bit too ...”

“... enjoyed a surge in business unmatched since the collapse of the Soviet Union; paramilitary forces took control of the oil infrastructure. By 2014 two competing governments had emerged, neither of which was in a position to govern. Algerian and Tunisian jihadists found a haven free from French-trained counter-insurgency units. Islamic State established its ...”

“... second marriage had been annulled, his first had ended in divorce), but married her secretly, then took extraordinary precautions to prevent anyone knowing he was married, living apart and visiting Charlotte only clandestinely. The problem was Germaine de Staël, with whom Constant had been locked in a tempestuous on-again, off-again affair for some 12 ...”

“... first encounter with Protestantism in mainland Europe, on embassy in Lutheran Nuremberg, Cranmer took a keen interest in the innovative liturgy he saw there, but also in Margarete, niece of the pastor presiding in the church of St Lorenz; he married her just before Henry chose him as archbishop of Canterbury, and she eventually joined him in his ...”

“... died hard. Although Price insists on the particular industrial context in which conflict took place, he refuses to accept that this manifested merely a defensive resistance to encroachments. He rejects, in short, the Leninist distinction between a ‘trade-union’ consciousness, limited by its spontaneity to immediate grievances, and a ...”

“... from the lift. When they begin, Butts is living with a lover named Eleanor Rogers but also seeing John Rodker, an aspiring writer who is chiefly known today for his activities as a publisher of deluxe editions: a portfolio of Fifteen Drawings by Wyndham Lewis (1919), Ara Vos Prec by Eliot (1920), and Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920) and Cantos 17-27 by Pound ...”

“... called Don Griffin, who, like my father at the time, worked as a guard for British Rail, took offence. Out the Saxon dog went and off down the high street, with my father in hot pursuit, and me in hot pursuit of my father. At the end of the street there was a cemetery. Don leapt over the wall, my father followed, with me bringing up the rear, all ...”

“... All these types dance through the short, catastrophic history of the Company of Scotland, which took a nation’s money to found a colony on the Panama isthmus in 1698 and ended flat bust in 1701. To read about Darien is to feel that, in a deep sense, venture capitalism is incapable of learning from experience. Of course, its technologies in industrial ...”

“... listeners with music, along with record shops, mail-order labels, American college radio and John Peel’s late evening show: a self-sustaining terrarium of ‘indie’ culture; a lost world.Music and life were indistinguishable for Reynolds in the decade after 1984, an intensely productive period that took in his ...”

“... eat like an elephant, work like a dog, and love my Dad and Mum as only their Van Dyke can.’ He took up smoking and sent his younger brother cigarette cards showing uniforms and battles. He revered his captain, ‘an awful sport’ who had won the Military Cross at the First Battle of Ypres. In July he was commissioned into the 3rd Battalion of the Royal ...”

“... the spring of 1919 he moved to Milan to work for Costruzioni Meccaniche Nazionali and in October took part in Italy’s first postwar motor race, the Parma to Poggio di Berceto hill climb. The following month he competed in the Targa Florio in Sicily. A spectator was killed when he ‘inadvertently crossed the finish line’, as Dal Monte puts it, ‘just as ...”

“... including a remarkable feat of railway engineering which linked the port to the new capital. It took 30 years to complete. ‘Between Massawa and Asmara,’ Wrong explains, ‘the land soars from sea level to 2300 metres in just 70 kilometres.’ At its steepest the Eritrean railway touched a gradient of 1 in 28. It is running again today, with steam ...”

“... to go back to Yale, where he moonlighted as a talent-spotter for his old deputy.Angleton took Matthiessen on a drive around Washington and told him that Paris was a plum assignment. Until then Matthiessen hadn’t realised he’d been hired. Three months of stateside training would be necessary. Matthiessen baulked at coming down to Washington ...”

“... only interest was golf. Having created in Kennedy a glamorous genius, innumerable writers then took pleasure in demonstrating that he was both frivolous and false and in destroying his reputation with gossip. But it can be argued that Kennedy was an able leader, with a fresh and alert mind, who was respected by other world leaders. It is but simple truth ...”