“... flesh as passing shadows. Hardly was Budé told of Erasmus’s sense of outrage before he, too, took offence. Erasmus’s heart must have given a lurch when he saw the address on the letter: ‘From Guillaume Budé, his erstwhile friend, to Erasmus, with best wishes – and never again’. And it goes on in the same tone: ‘your ill-tempered ...”

“... political vocabularies have been emptied of any possible meaning, these conjectures often took the form of jokes. One which appeared as a strip-cartoon in the pages of La Codorniz, a semi-clandestine Spanish version of Le Canard Enchaîné, went as follows: the young prince Felipe asks the king, whether there will be a public holiday when Franco ...”

“... as a soldier were seen at their best at the Battle of the Bulge, when the German offensive which took everyone by surprise was expertly contained. The Allies crossed the Rhine in good order, but there was trouble again over the invasion of Germany. Eisenhower, by now barely on speaking terms with Montgomery, decided not to try to get first to Berlin, an ...”

“... fame by standing outside singing a hymn while the major was engaged within; the latter afterwards took his boot to the missionary in no uncertain fashion. The Bombay Guardian found the fracas excellent copy. Missionary zeal also led Moss to acquire a tricycle as a means of chasing after ‘the carriages of some of the aristocratic official frequenters of the ...”

“... Election by Ronald Reagan, Carter had an understandable yearning to be taken seriously, and Abedi took him very seriously indeed. The holy banker flew round and round the world with the exPresident so that both men could declare their shared faith in the importance of Third World development – and conduct a bit of business on the side. When the Carter ...”

“... so interested in South American fiction as they have since become, and few indeed were those who took an interest in South American politics – apart perhaps from worrying about the imperious interventions of North Americans, so eager to counter the threat of Communism in their hemisphere. Huneeus stimulated an interest in such matters which persisted in ...”

“... Calcutta, figuring as it does an open, silent mouth, no longer refers to the historical event that took place in the 18th century in which English men, women and children were trapped by Indian soldiers in a small, suffocating cell in the city. It refers to the unsayable that lay, and still often lies, at the heart of the colonial encounter, the breakdown in ...”

“... early this century – so Halldór Laxness, the Nobel Prize winner, records – an Icelander took his daughter to a book-shop to buy her a copy of Örvar-Odds saga. But the old bookseller told him he’d do much better with Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines, with its hero Umslopogaas, ‘in his own way a great man, and in my opinion no whit ...”

“... the managers of the Farm Security Administration camps to writers, artists and intellectuals, like John Steinbeck, the FSA photographers Dorothea Lange and Arthur Rothstein, folklorists working for the Library of Congress, the economist Paul Taylor, the sociologist Carey McWilliams, and even Woodie Guthrie, who provided the words and music. The migrants were ...”

“... dealer called Oreese Stevenson; inside, they found $21,500 and half a kilo of cocaine. Jenkins took Stevenson’s keys and went to his house, where he found guns, more cocaine and bags of money. He didn’t have a search warrant. He called a friend, Donny Stepp, and told him to come over. Stepp was a bail bondsman and drug dealer who had spent time in ...”

“... Recovery, a rope cinched tightly around her right ankle. She is defenceless and exposed. Captain John Kimber seems to be taking pleasure in her pain. He is corpulent, grotesque. We do not know the girl’s name. Nor did the crew who watched or assisted in her torture. They called one of her fellow captives Venus, which of course had no meaning in the village ...”

“... Andrew McCarthy, Judd Nelson, Ally Sheedy, Molly Ringwald – almost any actor who appeared in a John Hughes teen film qualified). The Literary Brat Pack was a journalistic readymade, roping together a number of writers who may have scarcely known each other and treating them as a floating soirée. It was cartoonish and unfair to most of the individuals ...”

“... at only about 50-70 per cent, none of them died during a Moon-landing mission, though Apollo 1 took the lives of three men on the launch-pad and Apollo 13 barely made it back after having to abort an attempt at landing. Hard-to-interpret Chinese ambitions apart, there are no active plans for further lunar landings, and so, more than thirty years on, these ...”

“... attempted for matters of weddings, christenings, churches, eating white bread’, the King took time to respond, then demanded unqualified submission, which, given the military situation, was, Hoyle tells us, ‘nonsense’. Henry VIII had complained that the Pilgrims’ articles were ‘dark, general and obscure’. The North responded with the ...”

“... Strachey found something of the same attraction in Newton’s older contemporary, the biographer John Aubrey. Strachey saw himself as the product of an ‘embryonic generation’ almost as remote now from the Victorians as Aubrey had been from the Middle Ages, yet as Aubrey was haunted by the lost world of medieval magic, so Strachey and the other club ...”