“... being exonerated by Nixon. The superiors, both immediate and remote, got clean away. A canny young military lawyer near the scene, Colin Powell by name, founded a lifelong reputation for promise and initiative by arranging to have the papers mixed up at the office of the Judge-Advocate General.I once asked Ron Ridenhour what had led him to risk ...”

“... Yale would have done well to add a multi-family tree to make all these relationships clear.)The young Edward was, therefore, one of a throng of half-brothers, both Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Danish (while he himself was Anglo-Norman), intent on killing one another. When his Anglo-Saxon half-brother Edmund Ironside died, 11-year-old Edward had to be hurried out ...”

“... remained very proper. Invitations to concerts and proposals for visits were extended to the young couple but were mostly refused; much was made of commissions for antique carpets and food parcels, for Stösslová’s husband was something of a wheeler-dealer. Zdenka Janácek wrote in her memoirs that Mrs Stösslová’s letters to her at this time were ...”

“... no evidence of children denouncing their parents. However, she does find what she calls the ‘young avenger’ type, freely and recklessly denouncing neighbours, teachers and schoolmates in the hope of becoming a hero like Pavlik. She also rightly mentions the number of denunciations made because people were themselves afraid of being denounced and ...”

“... role in that most celebrated of literary love affairs, between Elizabeth and her fellow poet Robert Browning. Famously eloping in 1846 to escape her tyrannical father, they honeymooned in Pisa, and it was here one morning that Elizabeth shyly slipped a sheaf of papers into her new husband’s pocket. She hurried back to her private study, leaving ...”

“... terrorists by the same method. Streep appears again in Lions for Lambs (2007), directed by Robert Redford, another decent liberal movie but interminably talky. She is a long-time journalist interviewing Tom Cruise as the rising star of the uncertain Republican Party. Redford is a weary but devoted college professor trying to awaken idealism in what he ...”

“... When, in War and Peace, young Nikolai Rostov first rides, into action with his fellow hussars against the French at Austerlitz, he feels that the longed-for time has come ‘to experience the intoxication of a charge’, about which he has heard so much. At first he is indeed elated, but then the unseen enemy suddenly becomes visible, Rostov’s horse is shot under him, there is ‘around him nothing but the still earth and the stubble ...”

“... to re-impose the formal structures left behind them in their travels through space and time. Robert Lawson-Peebles’s word for this dialectic is ‘redcoatism’, after the practice of British regiments in the French and Indian War of lining up in bright scarlet uniforms only to get picked off by their assailants hiding behind trees. But the American ...”

“... ears, bit her, punched her in the face, and almost broke her legs by kicking her furiously.’Even Robert Lowell got carried away. In his long sonnet sequence ‘History’, he imagines one of Mary’s famous flights by night across Scotland on horseback as happening by car:We roared off hell-wheel and scattered the soft mob;happily only one man splashed the ...”

“... through the softened version of the type in the film Gypsy. Simpson also moves beyond the usual young-person-misunderstood story by not allowing us to forget that distant wars as well as exasperating relatives affect lives, and by returning us frequently to the people (centrally, the women), and the common culture, left behind: sections of the novel are ...”

“... immortalised on the screen by Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep, mortalised by Dick Powell and Robert Montgomery during Chandler’s lifetime, and afterwards by Elliot Gould, Robert Mitchum and James Garner. He was the hero of the most listened to radio detective serial in history, and, by the time Chandler died in ...”

“... run of huge box-office successes – The Sand Pebbles, The Thomas Crown Affair, Bullitt – it was Robert Mitchum, his elder by 13 years and a star for more than twenty, who was voted the screen’s ‘godfather of cool’ on America’s university campuses.Both men had got to where they were by doing or seeming to do nothing. It was the fashion. Gary ...”

“... the proposed first employment contract law (CPE), which would have made it easier to hire and fire young workers, students came out in large numbers to support the unions and the régimes spéciaux. About forty students met in the vestibule off the main entrance of the Ecole Normale Supérieure at 45 rue d’Ulm – an ideal space because cramped and ...”

“... grunt Tim O’Brien, face the darkness squarely. The third, former US Secretary of Defence Robert McNamara, merely pretends to. In his own way, however, each writer tells the story of a quest or a flight, a search for redemption and understanding, a search for the truth, or an escape from it. Each, in his own way, is likewise a cipher for the American ...”

“... 11, leaving the family $8 after funeral expenses had been paid. Frost’s mother, Isabelle, took Robert and his sister east from San Francisco to Lawrence, Massachusetts, where they lived initially with her parents-in-law before Isabelle tried – with mixed results – to hold down a job as a teacher. Frost was many things before he was a poet; by the time ...”