“... 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 ...”

“... They served at the pleasure of their sovereigns and not a minute longer. After all, it only took the young Kaiser Wilhelm II a stroke of the pen to dismiss the great Bismarck who had served his grandfather for 26 years. Hersh is right to say that Kissinger understood the terms of his employment: ‘Henry Kissinger entered the White House on Inauguration ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... VII and Prince Charles may be added the names of every long-suffering heir since the Hanoverians took over: George II, George IV and Edward VIII, not forgetting poor Prince Frederick, the son of George II and father of George III, who did not survive to reign at all. Whatever their differences of character and temperament, all of them had to confront the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... by his translation of the Austrian folk tale Bambi, which carried a moist Foreword from John Galsworthy.) This was the literary bridge that carried Chambers from relative hackdom on the Daily Worker to pre-eminence at the Stalinist flagship of letters, The New Masses. Indeed it was his usefulness and ability in this department that got him ...”

“... done when the Sun was new and its light faint: too faint to keep water from freezing. No wonder it took 3.5 billion years to get as far as blundering bipeds with sharp stones in their hands.This story – pieced together only in the later years of this century, to a large extent in the wake of planetary exploration – was part of the mythology of the ‘blue ...”

“... In so far as there was a shared response to Hart Crane’s poetry after his suicide in 1932, it took the form of invidious comparisons. ‘Crane had the sensibility typical of Baudelaire,’ R.P. Blackmur wrote in 1935, ‘and so misunderstood himself that he attempted to write The Bridge as if he had the sensibility typical of Whitman ...”

“... Desert, manfully concerned himself with the creation of the Strategic Air Command – a theme that took advantage of the B-36’s capacity to fill the Cinemascope screen. The letterbox format was less suited to June Allyson’s face, but she did her best. She not only pouted in Cinemascope, she lisped in four-track stereophonic sound, flooding the auditorium ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... uncomfortable remarriage at the age of 60, his mean half-brother and the years of abandonment took their toll. He went back to live with his sisters and their husbands in the Armenian immigrant community of Watertown, Massachusetts, and thereafter made no effort to help his father, even through his final decline. In 1947, Sedrak checked himself into a ...”

“... the Cubans had done for the FNLA and helped to install the MPLA in Luanda, Unita slowly but surely took on the characteristics (and frightening strengths) of an ethnic movement, like Inkatha in South Africa or Karadzic’s Serbian Democratic Party in Bosnia. (Both Savimbi and Karadzic preferred to be addressed as ‘Doctor’. Perhaps it will be ‘Dr ...”

“... a story far more colourful than the truth . . . one’s truth is let alone.’ So who knows?He took to acting not least because he found it easy. He served his apprenticeship as an extra in Hopalong Cassidy westerns, in which the main obligation was to be able to ride a horse, shoot a gun and look comfortable in front of the camera. There was no direction ...”