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“... what would happen if a member of al-Qaida crossed the American border. ‘We wouldn’t do the guy. It would be FBI who’d do him, because he’s a terrorist in the United States.’ On the one hand, the NSA, trained to pluck Soviet transmissions from the ether: on the other, the FBI, with its experience of domestic manhunts. Free to operate in the space ...”

“... Historians’ estimates range from 37 per cent (Jonathan Riley-Smith) to as high as 75 per cent (John France), with illness and starvation causing more deaths than combat. Women faced the additional hazard of pregnancy, which could be life-threatening at the best of times, and, like men, they could be taken captive. Despite the romance figure of the female ...”

“... as the voice of the coincidentally named Jim Dale in Mrs Dale’s Diary), and in 1937 she married Guy Ramsey, a journalist and competitive bridge player. She was a devoted secretary to Rumer Godden, with whom she shares a lean style and lack of pretension, and a reader at Curtis Brown, where she was said to have read more manuscripts than anyone else in ...”

“... it is often seen as a site of ambiguity and insecurity. As Dora says, quoting the film critic Guy Lodge, ‘in cinema … nothing good ever happens in a lighthouse,’ and things don’t usually go much better in fiction. Edgar Allan Poe’s final story, which is set in a lighthouse, has a double ambiguity: it is unclear whether it was left unfinished ...”

“... The American philosopher John Dewey thought that democracy should be like a giant conversation: the nation talking to itself about its hopes and fears and listening to what other people have to say. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately) for Dewey, he never got to hear what such a conversation might sound like, because the technology wasn’t available ...”

“... One man on the ranch has ‘the feminine duskiness of a cinematic villain’; another ‘reminded Guy of the adventure books of his youth’. Those who were alive at the time have tended to depict the Manson girls as lost souls or icons of camp and have tended not to give them the credit of motive that the 27-year-old Cline gives her fictionalised ...”

“... Virgin Mary, who took care of me … Fight with Hope devastating. Only person I had then was Uncle John who was rarely there or sober. The disillusion when he hit the kid and dog was Awful for me. The year or so left was lonely hell. Only reason i’m telling you this is that i know i have dealt with these few years ad nauseum. Problem is everytime I am ...”

“... to get away from her mother – they share a room – and spies an escape route in Master John Edes, a mild-mannered shipping clerk who has been teaching her to read the gospel. But Edes is an associate of a sinister newcomer called Matthew Hopkins, who is on a mission to root out witchcraft. In wartime Manningtree, Puritan fervour is running ...”

“... embarrassment.’ But Podhoretz was more than a fan boy. He was also a dependable, standup guy. It was Podhoretz whom he leaned on for support and counsel in the hungover days following the awful night he stabbed his second wife, Adele, with a penknife at the bitter conclusion of a party punctuated with scuffles and screaming matches. Unlike ...”

“... I saw no cowboys on television but plenty on the movie screen, from the Lone Ranger and Tonto to John Wayne, and I still have a picture of myself as a little boy in a cowboy outfit with a hat and chaps and toy pistols. It’s a small indication of how deeply influenced Cubans were by our mighty neighbour to the north, and the way the fiction of the ...”

“... the biographising of Anthony Eden is one of some interest. He offered the task to the late Sir John Wheeler-Bennett, author of many major books including a study of the Munich crisis and the official biography of George VI, who agreed on condition that he would not be expected to publish in Lord Avon’s lifetime. By a tragic irony of events Sir ...”

“... London house, 46 Lower Belgrave Street, the countess was violently assaulted and her husband, John Bingham, seventh earl of Lucan, disappeared, offer all things to all tastes. The story has the violent glamour of crime fiction with the additional thrill of reality, and the facts are just enough to make a narrative while leaving hugely tantalising areas of ...”

“... Mark Griffiths: his elaborately illustrated essay, ‘Face to Face with Shakespeare’, focused on John Gerard’s well-known Elizabethan manual of botany, The Herball or, General Historie of Plantes, and purported to demonstrate that one of the four seemingly allegoric figures on its ornamental title-page – a figure clad in a Roman costume and crowned with ...”

“... arrived in Beirut in August 1956, just as the Suez Crisis was brewing. Ever since the defection of Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean five years earlier, he’d been living in something of a twilight zone. Intercepts of Soviet communications decrypted by the Venona Project had pointed to there being a ‘third man’ inside British intelligence who had helped ...”

“... or at least beginning as, just very standard pulp detective writing, the violent incident and the guy returning to his PI office. But it very soon moves away from that and begins to circle towards what we assume is the autobiography of the first person narrator, Lew Griffin. The book becomes more and more real as it progresses and begins to turn itself into a ...”