“... and going into the subject a certain amount. Some in the press had shown they were ready to do so: Douglas Warth, in the Sunday Pictorial, warned that ‘the natural British tendency to pass over anything unpleasant in scornful silence’ was providing cover for an ‘unnatural sex vice which is getting a dangerous grip in this country … The silence, I ...”

“... crusade in Asia under the leadership of the Americans or anyone else.’ Later the same day, in a speech in Manchester, he had gone even further, proclaiming that ‘at the moment the danger to a negotiated settlement in Asia is provided by a lunatic fringe in the American Senate.’ After he became leader of the Labour Party in 1963, Wilson placed ...”

“... among the orange groves and onion fields north of Los Angeles. We do catch the odd glimpse of Douglas Fairbanks or Charlie Chaplin off-duty, and we learn that, ‘contrary to dark rumour’, Fairbanks wears his own teeth: but what Vidal has to offer might have been more accurately if less enticingly labelled Woodrow Wilson and Warren Harding. Hollywood ...”

“... remotely disconcerts, let alone disturbs. It is instructive to compare it with those films of Douglas Sirk – All that Heaven Allows, Imitation of Life, A Time to Love and a Time to Die etc – that are, apparently, soapy weepies but contain within, because of their rigid adherence to genre conventions, descriptions of the way human beings are cut up to ...”

“... bowler to resort to the dubious tactic of running out the batsman at the bowler’s end. It was Douglas Jardine who masterminded the notorious ‘bodyline’ tactics of Larwood and Voce; as captain, Peter May too was criticised for short-pitched bowling, time-wasting and nullifying the immortal Sonny Ramadhin’s fiendish spin by simply kicking the ball ...”

“... to dwell. But Punch paid well, which was a valuable bonus when one’s income fell to a shilling a day in time of war; and its prestige was such that merely to have written for it that week was enough to win over an otherwise hesitant officer-selection board. Today a boasted connection with the Al Fayed Punch would be no way to win military advancement. The ...”

“... Her routine did not vary: at the revolving rack outside the big Rexall she would pause each day to inspect the unchanging selection of postcards. Three blocks further she would stop at the harbour, sit on the low wall above the docks and watch the loading or unloading of one or another inter-island freighter. After the Rexall and the harbour she ...”

“... them ‘are mostly well educated and informed but they are afraid and feel threatened’. Mary Douglas and Aaron Wildavsky put it well in Risk and Culture (1982): What are Americans afraid of? Nothing much, really, except the food they eat, the water they drink, the air they breathe, the land they live on, and the energy they use. In the amazingly short ...”

“... 1974, it appeared, coinciding happily with nationwide labour troubles and Edward Heath’s three-day week; and of course it was large and plush – and expensive to buy. I wanted something that looked good. I think now it stands up pretty well in terms of its appearance.People objected precisely on the grounds that it looked too good for a minority literary ...”

“... In a letter of May 1919 Hardy told his friend Sir George Douglas he hadn’t been doing much, ‘mainly destroying old papers’. ‘How they raise ghosts,’ he added. He was still at it in September when he complained of the ‘dismal work’ of destroying papers that were of ‘absolutely no use for any purpose God or man’s ...”

“... night light seemed like the fog of war itself. Then it was perhaps the most surprising of all the day’s surprises to smell the sweet smell of summer grass, a smell of cattle and peace and the sun that had warmed the earth some other time when summer was real. Her later reports, from Latin America in the Eighties and Nineties, are not in my copy of The Face ...”

“... Foxhunting Man or I might have been reminded of the narrator describing how as a boy on his second day out hunting he sees a fox run across his path; someone ‘holloa’s and before he can stop himself he exclaims: ‘Don’t do that, they’ll catch him.’ The narrator tells us later that before he went to France to fight he had ‘never shot at a bird or ...”

“... in attendance , as well as the whole photographic and editorial team of Hello!. (She said this day was as good as the first day of her marriage, which made me think the first day probably hadn’t been so good.)Perhaps Princess Diana and Prince Charles broke the rules, boldly crossed ...”

“... Sure enough, in November 2000, the month after the Human Rights Act came into effect, Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones arrived in the Court of Appeal, seeking to hold the emergency injunction granted to them and to OK! magazine to stop OK!’s rival Hello! from publishing unauthorised photographs of the Douglases’ wedding in New York. Although ...”

“... The United States, even the world, desperately needs more Ellsbergs. Sunday, 13 June 1971 is a day I remember very clearly: the day when excerpts from the History of US Decision-Making in Vietnam, 1945-68 (the actual title of the ‘Pentagon Papers’) began to appear in the press. I was serving as a consultant to the ...”