“... word “torture” is not exaggerated,’ ‘La Disciplote’ claimed. Some of these tortures – iron shackles, being deprived of light, food and sleep – were meted out to Dreyfus during the five years he spent incommunicado on Devil’s Island. Many, including Dreyfus himself, described his life on the island as a living tomb. One of the prisoners in ...”

“... their say under the rubric ‘Forum’. As well as Foot, Harrisson and King-Hall, they included Richard Crossman, George Orwell and E.F. Schumacher. Garvin, who was fiercely pro-Churchill, wrote in his diary that these unwelcome contributors were ‘carpers, crabbers, grousers, disappointed prigs, pedants, muddlers, moonstruck dreamers … the people who ...”

“... cultural revival. Georgians were making stupendous films; the Rustaveli Theatre’s production of Richard III pulverised Edinburgh audiences who understood not a word of the language. The nation was rediscovering its past, and falling in love with what it discovered. One favourite anecdote told of a senior Georgian Communist who was expelled from the party ...”

“... an inveterate collector. ‘His apartment,’ Gopnik writes, ‘was overflowing with ancient cast-iron machines from penny arcades … The collection also included a cigar-store sculpture, vintage store signs, carved carousel horses, seating made out of animal horns and twigs and, of course, the camp classic, a stuffed peacock.’ Two decades later, he would ...”

“... did not intend the city’s siege but had ‘bumbled into it’. Commenting on this volte-face, Richard Poirier wrote in Raritan Review that ‘the feelings aroused in Chancellor (and in millions of viewers presumably) by the television footage simply had no place to go outside the programme.’ Far from just changing his mind from one week to the ...”

“... Roth chose Blake Bailey, the well-regarded biographer of Charles Jackson (The Lost Weekend), Richard Yates and John Cheever, three alcohol-plagued novelists whose torments kept late hours. As it happened Atlas would outlive Roth only by a year, dying in September 2019 from complications of a lung condition. At the close of Remembering Roth, he bids sad ...”

“... accommodation. People built sanitariums and spa hotels, they planted palm trees and erected iron piers, as if one could promenade from restoration to decline, from cheerfulness to death, without it seeming so dark or sordid a journey. The hotels were white. ‘They come here to die,’ wrote the man who laid out the gardens by the pier at ...”

“... a TV crew reassured us that we were still in the real world. The tall, London-based CNN presenter Richard Quest, in tailored trenchcoat, waited impressively for his gear. CNN was here for some really significant story – the marriage of Sir Paul McCartney and anti-landmine campaigner Heather Mills, perhaps; a shade less probably, the wedding in St Eugene’s ...”

“... fears that disintegration of a familiar world might go still further justified a ruler with an iron hand, if the country was not to fall into complete chaos. The road from the hunting lodge in Belarus led to the butchery in Grozny. Humiliation in the first Chechen War was avenged by Putin in the second, and his regime could acquire a real mass base as a ...”

“... fastest at 17-18 knots (20 mph). The first coastal steamer to be made of steel rather than wood or iron, the Columba was also unusually light. Black smoke streaming from its twin funnels, its canoe bow running knife-like through the waves, the ship became a famous sight all along its route. Those lucky enough to be aboard (Glasgow merchants, Edinburgh ...”

“... in the flats above and below don’t even know there’s been a fire. This was something else.’ Richard Welsh is a senior officer with the London Fire Brigade. His pager went off at 1.18 a.m. ‘Initially they had six machines there,’ he said. ‘Then they asked for eight, and then ten, and then 15, 20, and then 25. I’m hearing that on the way there, so ...”