“... States has a right to dictate what happens in Cuba can be traced as far back as the presidency of John Quincy Adams, when conventional wisdom held that Spain’s dominion over Cuba would inevitably give way to the island’s incorporation into the United States. ‘It’s in the neighbourhood’s interest that Cuba be free,’ Bush said when he introduced the ...”

“... consequently, Labour should show ‘humility’ and return to Blairism under a different leader. John Rentoul recently wrote in the Independent that the Labour Party has moved ‘to the left faster than the speed of light’. The definition of ‘left’ here is one that few outside Blairite circles would recognise, but it’s still telling. The idea that ...”

“... work from which McKenna quotes with a certain relish. The arrest was a worrying moment for John Fiske, the American consul in Edinburgh, whose love letters to Boulton were already in the hands of the police and who was no doubt looking into diplomatic immunity. It was also a troubling time for Lord Arthur Pelham-Clinton, son of the Duke of ...”

“... Elsie, Strong recalls without irony, was ‘a better class of person’, the same evocative phrase John Osborne used, with heavy irony, as the title of his autobiography. Osborne was six years older than Strong and from a strikingly similar background about which he was equally unforgiving, as was another close contemporary, Joe Orton. The three make a ...”

“... sympathies (in spite of my official views generally) are against the coup’ – but he took no stand against the junta. With all the praise for A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water, there came a few catcalls. Too many epithets, too many magnificent landscapes. And what sort of footsore traveller was this, who spent so many nights ...”

“... no respectable architect could build anything with a clear conscience, Koolhaas ridiculed what he took as the sentimentality and impotence of architects whose only response to the tidal wave of business parks and mega-malls overwhelming the globe was to retreat into an autistic obsession with the precision with which doors could be fitted into walls, or the ...”

“... or Otaheite’. The same October week that Grace scrawled out ‘crisis’, loyalist fortunes took a desperate turn when Cornwallis surrendered to the Americans at Yorktown, sealing Britain’s defeat. Within a matter of months, British forces began withdrawing. The Galloways’ predicament was replayed in loyalist households across America. What would ...”

“... series of highlights (Diary and Letters of Madame d’Arblay, 1842-46), they were savaged by John Wilson Croker in the Tory Quarterly Review. Hatchet jobs were Croker’s speciality: it was his review of Endymion that Byron joked was the cause of Keats’s death in Don Juan (‘’Tis strange the mind, that very fiery particle,/Should let itself be ...”

“... Orton and Halliwell pasted a monkey’s head onto Collins Guide to Roses; adorned a volume of John Betjeman’s poems with a photograph of a heavily tattooed, elderly man in swimming trunks; and glued pictures of giant cats onto the cover of Agatha Christie’s The Secret of Chimneys. At about the same time, a related tradition of artists’ books reached ...”

“... deal,’ Raymond Roussel wrote towards the end of his life, ‘but from all these travels I never took anything for my books.’ It’s an odd thing to hear from the author of Impressions d’Afrique (1910) and Nouvelles Impressions d’Afrique (1932). But it makes sense when you consider some of the ‘impressions’ he recorded in his journal during his ...”

“... been dealt with explicitly by other writers: Douglas Dunn, Tony Harrison, Linton Kwesi Johnson, John Agard, Grace Nichols and Tom Leonard, to name a few. For some, ‘literary art’ is a territory to be attained (Harrison’s ‘we’ll occupy/ your lousy leasehold, poetry’), in others a rule-book to be torn up (Agard’s ‘mugging de Queen’s ...”

“... Yeats was prematurely describing her as a woman stricken with age, she had a delirious affair with John Quinn, the American lawyer who was the great, almost indispensable, patron of the Yeats family. Foster, noting that her son, Robert, unlike Sir William, was short, allows himself (hiding the news in a note at the back of his huge book) to report local gossip ...”

“... The first time I took blood from someone it came as a surprise to both of us. All medical students must learn to take blood at some time during their course, but phlebotomy – like other skills requiring the use of sharp instruments – is usually left until the third year. A supplementary class I picked at the very beginning of my studies, however, turned out to include a practical lesson in blood-taking ...”

“... war weaponry; it was a horribly unequal contest. Roaming bands of survivors, heads bandaged, took to the hills; the defeated military attempted guerrilla raids from their shelters on the North Downs. Religion was no consolation. Fundamentalist clergy wandered the back roads and river paths between Staines and Richmond, calling for divine ...”

“... a sinister beauty and the power to inspire wonder. Botting cannot resist borrowing for an epigraph John Masefield’s tribute to the great sailing ships: ‘They mark our passage as a race of men,/Earth will not see such ships as these again.’ This lively book is a zeppelin history which concentrates on the round-the-world voyage of the Graf Zeppelin in ...”