“... Connecticut. There he built the family hacienda, Great Elm, staffed it with Mexican servants, took out a large loan from a French bank and settled down to raise a family in which William Jr, born in 1925, was the sixth of ten children.Great Elm was a hive of reaction. At the dinner table William Jr excelled at parroting his father’s opinions. The ...”

“... or was it, as the writer Hilton Als put it, ‘a high-faggot style’, or did it originate, as John Edgar Wideman claimed, from a mixture of the King James Bible and African American speech? Was it full of the clarity, eloquence and intelligence that Chinua Achebe suggested? And was Baldwin’s involvement with the Civil Rights Movement a cautionary tale ...”

“... and warm hearts, not for pedantic historians. Gallacher was one of those who put it about that John Maclean was out of his mind, literally hallucinating, when he ran his Scottish Workers Republican Party in opposition to the infant CPGB. Nevertheless, the name of the great Marxist dominie was repeatedly invoked, and Pat Lally, Glasgow’s Labour ...”

“... his wife) in surreptitious arrangements to meet his onetime lover. The President and his old flame took drives in the countryside together. She dined at the White House when his wife was away on her many travels around the United States. On one of the President’s own train trips from the capital to the West Coast, he invited his country cousin along. She ...”

“... some mail through the bedroom window, among it a Jiffy bag with a book in it from a Dublin friend, John, the nephew I recall of the Unionist doctor who found that bronze pin all those years ago. In the book, Trees of Ireland: Native and Naturalised, I read under Hazel: ‘Fruit, a true nut, egg-shaped, up to 2cm long, pale green becoming brown with woody ...”

“... to come.” It was a risky saying, for many fine first novels are followed by duds. However, I took great heart from what he said, and went on my way rejoicing.’The years leading up to this occasion for rejoicing have been strange and thrilling ones, a real-life intimation, should Muriel Spark have needed one, that life, when looked at from the ...”

“... the composer’s direction, not to worry about rehearsing – he was off to the races. Menuhin took it as a sporting example of English phlegm, as indeed it was. But while Menuhin sounds wonderful in the 1932 recording, the orchestra could have done with some polishing.♪ The founding of the BBC Symphony Orchestra in 1930 and the London Philharmonic in ...”

“... in France then, which was enormous.’ Christian Zervos is recollecting the day that Picasso took him, as a favoured confidant, to his vaults in the Banque de France. The fortune Zervos was allowed to glimpse in the mid-1930s had ridden out the Wall Street crash, and had been accumulating since before the First World War. The epithet ‘triumphant’ in ...”

“... of modern Ireland, when faced 27 years ago with a short life of Charles Stewart Parnell which took implicit but cheeky issue with his own magnum opus on the Chief. The young Bew – Belfast-born and a graduate of People’s Democracy marches as well as of the Cambridge history faculty – had already published a radical marxisant version of the 1879-82 ...”

“... carried out in Japan became increasingly important as an example of what awaited countries that took the capitalist road, rather than following the siren songs emanating from Beijing and Moscow. The Vietnam War was at its height, and the architects of America’s Cold War could take comfort from their ability to contrast a prosperous, peaceful, capitalist ...”

“... He was voicing the received scholarly opinion of his time, mediated to him through the writings of John Burnet and F.M. Cornford, Russell’s one-time colleague at Trinity College, Cambridge. And that scholarly opinion was itself the codification, with properly footnoted sources, of a millennia-long tradition about Pythagoras and mathematics.What happened ...”

“... obligation and behaviour for more than two millennia. In Gilead, Robinson’s dying preacher, John Ames, ruminates that we are ‘a little civilisation built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilisations’, and the explicit argument of Reading Genesis is that we fail adequately to understand this patrimony. We are diminished by this, and so is ...”

“... But his camera plays an ambiguous game, in two stages. First of all it withholds the full sight of John Merrick (John Hurt), tantalising the audience with reaction shots, glimpses, a silhouette against a screen. The viewer’s appetite for freakishness is played with, worked up and then strangely shamed. After Lynch has ...”

“... friend in limbo, A spider had spun his web across, And sate in the midst with arms a-kimbo: So I took pity, for learning’s sake, And, de profundibus, accentibus laetisCantate, quoth I, as I got a rake, And up I fished his delectable treatise. Here you have it, dry in the sun, With all the binding all of a blister, And great blue spots where the ink has ...”

“... National Security Adviser), but also supplied the President with what National Security Adviser John Poindexter called ‘plausible deniability’ by insulating him from the men like North who were actually implementing his covert operations. Split from one another and from Reagan himself, North and Regan were the doubles of the President they served. ‘I ...”