“... budget has increased by between 17 per cent and 25 per cent every year, and by 1983 its new chief, William Casey, was able to boast of a new record in the scale of covert operations – the putting into the field of a ‘secret army’ of 10,000 Somozista ‘contras’ against Nicaragua. One former CIA employee estimates that there has been a fivefold ...”

“... historical writing as there was on the subject – the work of the Anglo-German economic historian William Otto Henderson was the outstanding instance – tended to focus on refuting the allegations of violence and brutality that had led to the empire’s dismantling and redistribution at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. By the 1960s these arguments were no ...”

“... Before the Kinder were sent to foster homes, most spent some weeks in a Butlin’s summer camp at Dovercourt Bay near Harwich. The huts weren’t built for the severe winter of 1938, and Segal sat in coat and gloves writing letters to convince the refugee committee to help. In one ‘tear-jerker’, she compared her parents to a snow-covered rose ...”

“... beach and jeopardise its secrecy? On an expedition to a nearby tourist island to buy rice for the camp, Richard is self-righteously disgusted by the loudness and sloppiness of those who inhabit ‘the World’. Then, just before sailing back, he comes across the body of a recently dead junkie, lying beside his sleeping girlfriend. In order to save her from ...”

“... feeling is that the No vote is crumbling. Fifteen per cent are still undecided, but the No camp gained significantly from the temporary release of the Balcombe Street IRA gang and the Loyalist killer Michael Stone. I remember die Kipling story, ‘The Village that Voted the Earth Was Flat’. I fear the flat-earthers and can’t be sure. Outside the ...”

“... What is peculiar to Górecki, and what appears to alarm the faint-hearted in the Modernist camp no less than the admirers of (say) Tavener or Arvo Pärt, is his spectacular independence from market considerations of any sort. Fact and fiction can safely take the same country road towards the wooden cabin near the Tatra Mountains where the penurious and ...”

“... have lost. Yet a doubt hangs over the whole exercise, voiced by Dronke himself: did people like William of Conches or Hermann of Carinthia have any serious effect on society? Or were they, so to speak, the ‘literary theorists’ of their day: highly prominent and well-paid in their fields, but exercising zero effect on politics, mass media, society at ...”

“... attacks on people living ignorant of their fate in selected areas, a sort of eugenic concentration camp.’ Louisa, the Christina figure, asks ‘unpleasantly’ whether he would keep himself alive, but gets no answer. As a young woman Stead became a teacher, the profession she dreaded most because she associated it with spinsterhood. Like Teresa in For Love ...”

“... Halliday writes, ‘is sustained from two apparently contradictory sides – from the camp of those, mainly in the West, seeking to turn the Muslim world into another enemy, and from those within the Islamic countries who advocate confrontation with the non-Muslim, and particularly Western, world.’ Even if the present governments fighting ...”

“... her looking at people, we can see the decadence unfurling – this is how Nightwood got its gloopy camp. One of Barnes’s funniest and most extravagant interviews (and one in which we get an image of Barnes herself) is with Helen Westley. The actress and co-founder of the Theatre Guild called her and said: ‘I want to be interviewed again.’ They met at the ...”

“... would remodel itself perpetually, like a transformer or a superchangeling: an unrealisable ideal William Burroughs brought down to the affordability of ordinary people in his proposal for the cut-up book, which you could simply rearrange at home according to your fancy. But The Invisible in Architecture is closer to these ideal images than the literary works ...”

“... John Wayne ‘the most important American of our time. Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan are only camp followers of Wayne, supporting players in the biggest Western of them all.’ As Maureen O’Hara, no friend of un-American activities, put it in her Congressional testimony, ‘John Wayne is not just an actor. John Wayne is the United States of ...”

“... of the Twenties and Thirties; like much new design of the Eighties and Nineties it has a slightly camp quality, as if it were imitating a long-ago imagining of the future. Also it stands alone, like Cesar Pelli’s more blockish but very American Canary Wharf tower, and its soaring glass surfaces, like Canary Wharf’s stainless steel ones, help make it a ...”

“... Ralph Rumney took up his camera and stalked Alan Ansen, Beat poet, paedophile and intimate of William Burroughs, publishing the finished product as a systematic collage called A Psychogeographic Map of Venice. More often than not, however, the city meant Paris. Like Benjamin, the Surrealists or indeed Baudelaire, the Situationists saw Paris as a topos ...”

“... The Chairman (pounding gavel): Just a minute – Mr Trumbo: Of an American concentration camp. The Chairman: This is typical Communists’ tactics. These grandiose gestures failed to impress. Public support evaporated soon after the trial, and the motion-picture companies, fearing boycotts, declared that the industry would not employ ...”