“... the commanding officer in Vietnam, was asking for 206,000 more troops. Neil Sheehan and Hedrick Smith reported this leak, which was accurate and had a devastating effect on Congress and the American people. It did not come from Ellsberg, but ‘as I observed the effect of this leak,’ he recalls, ‘it was as if clouds had suddenly opened. I realised ...”

“... the Washington watchdog apparatus, it grew more exacting in its attentions. An FBI report on Mr Smith Goes to Washington now called it ‘decidedly Socialist in nature’, while It’s a Wonderful Life was ‘an obvious attempt to discredit bankers’. The first of the three invasions of Hollywood by HUAC came in 1947, the others in 1951 and 1953. On every ...”

“... of scooter-borne rock fans, draped in the ambiguous insignia of RAF targets and Union Jacks. What Richard Weight calls the ‘very British style’ of Mod found its initial foothold in late 1950s Soho with the arrival of the jazz ‘modernists’, who defined themselves in strict opposition to the reigning gatekeepers of Trad. Modernists were wilfully ...”

“... will to literature received its fullest critical acknowledgment in the period between Richard Ellmann’s 1959 biography of Joyce and Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era (1971). Kenner’s book, based in part on interviews with Pound, presents itself as a parting glimpse of an age of demi-gods. It marvellously exhibits, by a vivid survey of ...”

“... Mellor and Gerald Kaufman (described by Isaacs as possessing ‘toxic conceitedness’) to Chris Smith were not amused. How, people asked, was the ‘income requirement’ of the Arts Council’s most voracious client arrived at? Were the singers’ fees not excessive, did the stage crews not live the life of Riley? A succession of investigations by ...”

“... and state expenditure.’ No doubt Keynes needed the Treasury View in the same way that Adam Smith needed the Mercantile System: as a received theoretical account of an erroneous prevalent practice, to be coherently expounded as a preliminary to its comprehensive refutation. But to dismiss it as a construct seems hard on Keynes when his adumbration of ...”

“... unravel mentally and physically. Starting out as a stereotypical man of action, Terrier resembles Richard Stark’s protagonist Parker, whose qualities Manchette listed in his diary: ‘L’insensibilité, la brutalité, l’obstination, la capacité professionnelle, la force. Parker est un sauvage.’ His emotions range from tensing his lips to grunting. His ...”

“... Pinocchio that it is Collodi’s original that has come to seem like the revised version. As Richard Wunderlich and Thomas Morrissey write in their study of Pinocchio in America, ‘Pinocchio’ Goes Postmodern (2002), Collodi’s novel is now merely a ‘version among versions’: an adult version in their view, unsuitable for children, because no ...”

“... story, Plath arrives at Cambridge immaculate, with her gold and white Samsonite luggage, her neat Smith College clothes, her shiny freshly-washed blond hair. And England drags her under, dirties her, releases the true poetic self, which is ‘aggressive, rude ... disorderly, sexual’. In death she is ‘the little defeated American girl’, Malcolm writes ...”

“... was sent a bomb in a hollowed-out book called Ice Brothers; another of his victims, Edward John Smith, had the same name as the captain of the Titanic. Kaczynski believed that the ship of modern technology was heading for an iceberg. Foster thinks that a close study of this evidence might have helped the authorities home in on Kaczynski earlier than they ...”

“... to embark on another round. In their introduction to Emma in the Cambridge edition of the novels, Richard Cronin and Dorothy McMillan argue that Austen wrote for the rereader. In Emma she deliberately sacrificed ‘readability’ for the sake of a novel that ‘demanded repeated rereadings’. Wiltshire cites their argument that Emma, more than any other of ...”

“... with your mum and dad in Essex. I bought a Bible, obviously – a Good News Bible, from W.H. Smith in Romford, the only bookshop I’d ever been to. I had no idea there were such things as bookshops that just sold books and not also, say, a full range of stationery items and cards for all occasions. My Good News Bible was translated from the original ...”

“... glad,” he said.’ One afternoon, Lewis read Aykroyd Arthur Koestler’s article on Richard Hillary, the fighter pilot and author of The Last Enemy. On 25 May Lewis had written to Gweno: ‘What twaddle of Koestler’s about him being wilfully led to a fascinating death!’ Now his voice cracked as he came to a passage that described a time ...”

“... efforts to reinvent a British tradition of patriotic, elite paternalism were heavily influenced by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett’s book The Spirit Level, with its strange subtitle, ‘Why Equality Is Better for Everyone’. Its underlying assumption was that inequality could only be tackled by an appeal to the rationality and self-interest of those ...”

“... 1964 essay reads in part like a field report on the gay underground of Warhol, the filmmaker Jack Smith and others), Sontag saw camp as ‘dandyism in the age of mass culture’ – that is, as a way of wresting the distinctive from the vulgar, of finding feeling in kitsch, of transcending ‘the nausea of the replica’. Some of this spirit, such as the ...”