“... on, and worse, a civil war, and though it has often been both dicey and impractical. The election took place as scheduled on 8 November 1864, even though during the summer Lincoln had feared he might lose it (whether it would have taken place if he had still feared he might lose in November is another question). The election ...”

“... the ladylike prescriptions of my upbringing, tilts into something quite other. Is that quality I took to be heroic self-possession a far more conventional, ladylike demureness, even complacency? Is there something smug and placid in those hands clasped at her waist?What I had thought was a watercolour turns out to be a lithograph from a chalk drawing with ...”

“... how this revolution changed Europe and the world.For many participants, in memory the revolutions took on a stark emotional chiaroscuro: the bright euphoria of the early days, and then the frustration, bitterness and melancholy that came when the ‘iron net’ of counter-revolution (as the Berliner Fanny Lewald put it) descended on the insurgent ...”

“... a stand on wildlife protection. The clientele assumed she had fallen in love with him. Morel then took to the bush and launched a vigilante campaign involving assaults on ivory traders, a manifesto inserted at gunpoint into a local newspaper, and the public spanking of a famous big game huntress. In time his campaign caught the world’s imagination, the ...”

“... There is often a vacancy to his acting, which can give the illusion of mystery. The producer John Foreman recalled that Newman’s second wife, Joanne Woodward, once said to him: ‘If you think he’s thinking something, he’s not always thinking something.’In Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Newman hardly moves his eyes when he speaks – only his mouth. We ...”

“... by William Manchester, better known for his account of the assassination of his wartime friend, John F. Kennedy, Death of a President. Written in a racy, sometimes sensational style, the book was full of sweeping generalisations about Germany and the Germans, whom Manchester, not least because of his war experiences, clearly did not like. The Krupps were ...”

“... Weight puts it in the first subheading of his introduction: ‘Amphetamines, Jean-Paul Sartre and John Lee Hooker’. Which is a nice phrase, even if it’s half-inched from an interviewee in a previous book, Jonathon Green’s flawless oral history of 1960s counterculture, Days in the Life. (In fact Green also used it as a subheading. This feels a bit ...”

“... serving as a junior spy in Moscow. When asked by Gorbachev, who was on his way to a meeting with John Major, what he did for a living, he claims to have answered: ‘I follow you very closely.’ Alas, the formulation he includes in the text, ‘Я следую вас очень близко,’ is a clumsily literal translation that makes little grammatical ...”

“... I do feel there is this core of darkness and nasty things. I don’t know where it came from. It took me many years to recognise that it was there and that it could be controlled. I find that I can just write with greater emotion and depth if I take these things from myself. It’s not that I step down and want Lew to be a figurehead, an avatar of ...”

“... theology” clergy.’ Aristide’s elevation from slum priest to presidential candidate took place against a background of right-wing death squads and threatened military coups. He rose quickly in the eyes of Haitians, but his stock plummeted in the United States. The New York Times, which relies heavily on informants who can speak English or ...”

“... a speculation about a particular memory as a 70th birthday gift. The memory concerned a trip Freud took to Athens with his brother, and his own ‘curious thought’ at the sight of the Acropolis: ‘So this all really does exist, just as we learned in school!’ Freud describes himself as two people, one making the comment and the other perceiving it: and ...”

“... McDonald has written (admiringly) of the ‘apparent fragility’ of the poems, and the critic John Lyon argued that ‘precariousness is a precondition of Longley’s art.’ Longley, who was all too familiar with protracted writer’s block, often spoke of precariousness in the sense that a poem might come but then again it might not. ‘I live from poem ...”

“... they all ate so much, and their conduct was such,/That it killed that Old Man of the East’). John St Loe Strachey was eight when he met Lear, and later recalled that ‘he knew a great deal about children, and they knew that he knew it and he knew that they knew that he knew it and so a complete and (as he might have said) abject harmony was ...”

“... the Jamestown site, believes this ‘is where the British Empire began’ – but then, recalling John Seeley’s famous dictum, this was to be an empire acquired ‘in a fit of absence of mind’ rather than as the result of state-sponsored design. The Virginia Company’s leaders, in England and America, were baffled, not least by the humid ...”

“... less well-known figures of heroic passion are given their moment in the limelight. These include John Jay Chapman (1862-1933), who in 1887 beat a rival with a stick, then in repentance burned off his own hand. In Chapman’s heroically dispassionate words, he ‘plunged the left hand deep in the blaze and held it down with my right hand for some ...”