“... days that shook the world’. It’s not much of an overstatement. Interviewed for the film Ian Hislop recalled wondering if this was what it felt like to be on the brink of civil war. For once Charles was ahead of his mother, insisting on taking the royal flight to Paris to bring the body back. For the queen, Diana, no longer HRH, was not part of the ...”

“... in tandem. And while Palmer concentrated on white revolutionaries, in his 1938 classic, The Black Jacobins, C.L.R. James successfully revived interest in the slaves and free blacks active in Saint-Domingue’s revolution in 1791. Arguing that liberty, equality and fraternity meant even more to the enslaved in France’s richest Caribbean colony than to ...”

“... by Attallah, a maid ‘on stiletto heels’ arrived with a ‘tiny gold-encrusted cup containing black coffee to which, under her master’s gaze, she added two drops of rose-water in the manner of a holy rite.’ Lovely young things rush about London when Attallah cries: ‘Find me an orchid, darling. I need an orchid – the best in town.’ The entourage ...”

“... The Shocks in the Kinsey Report’; ‘Would You Let Your Daughter Marry a Black Man?’; ‘Has the Bust Had It?’; ‘37 Film Stars Named in Errol Flynn Confession’. During the First World War, the Daily Mirror campaigned for greater public information and education on sexual matters. It was delighted to carry government health ...”

“... the National Guard.And sometimes reality is just as wild as Pynchon’s exuberant imagination, as Ian Hamilton discovered while trying to write the biography of another famously elusive American author. Since J.D. Salinger, like Pynchon, refused all interviews, made no public appearances and was barely ever caught on camera, he was hardly likely to co-operate ...”

“... the more thoroughly it is embedded in narrative detail, the more difficult it is to make black and white judgments. This approach to ethics might be contrasted with the rule-governed morality of utilitarianism and the categorical imperative of Kant, purportedly applicable in all places and at all times. We should not draw the line between virtue and ...”

“... to a £33.95 ticket and you get a glass of champagne to add fizz to your separation from the black-dot insects. I came here to swim in the highest pool in Europe, 52 floors above the station. The surface of this infinity pond, shivering with reflections like a Fun House mirror, memory-ripples of exercisers now taking their ease on Roman couches, sampling ...”

“... of native collaborators, who in the eyes of nationalists were betraying their own people, like black policemen in South Africa today. A Russian who abandons his native land and settles in a hostile country is always credited with the most laudable motives, like the archetypal author of I chose freedom. An honest Soviet dissident like Sakharov ...”

“... Alexander Cockburn​ blamed Ian Fleming for the creation of the CIA. Without Fleming, Cockburn wrote on the fiftieth anniversary of the first James Bond novel, ‘the Cold War would have ended in the early 1960s. We would have had no Vietnam, no Nixon, no Reagan and no Star Wars.’ As adjutant to Britain’s chief of naval intelligence, Lieutenant Commander Fleming undertook a secret mission to Washington in May 1941 ...”

“... Irish, whose communities have had the greatest experience of political disadvantage and unrest. Black poets here are less reluctant than white to give vent to their frustrations – they don’t recognise didacticism as a ‘problem’. Nor does Tom Paulin, who as a critic is much concerned with British and Irish politics, and as a poet mixes references to ...”

“... of Prussia was unknown; and in order that he might rob a neighbour whom he had promised to defend, black men fought on the coast of Coromandel, and red men scalped each other by the Great Lakes of North America.’ ‘Evil’? ‘Wickedness’? The ability to employ these terms without awkwardness or embarrassment has declined, while the capacity of modern ...”

“... back in Derry, fired up by Marxist-Leninist revolutionary ideology as well as admiration for the Black Panthers and the Aldermaston protesters. Later came ‘a Sorbonne-inspired belief in spontaneity’. McCann describes the atmosphere in the nationalist areas of Derry in the early 1960s as one of resentment and resignation. The city was effectively ...”

“... Ireland in 1969 he admitted that he had failed ‘to break the chains of ancient hatreds’. Ian Paisley was on the rise, stirring up fear and bigotry among the Protestant working classes. The McConville children lived in a Protestant area but went to a Catholic school and to Mass, though Helen also went with Granny Murray to ‘happy ...”

“... that a man could disappear while lying still in a peat bog – just as long as he was wearing black boots, a stone-coloured cap, a waistcoat the colour of a peat hag and knickerbockers as green as grass. It was not until December 1915 that Solomon was asked to visit the French camouflage workshop at Amiens, and to join others in developing a British ...”

“... asserting that he was the victim of a London faggot literary coterie, consisting of Martin Amis, Ian Hamilton and myself. (Amis and I contemplated a letter to the Face, saying that this was very unfair to Ian Hamilton, but then dumped the idea.) Now here is Mailer attempting the near-impossible: that is to say, a novel ...”