“... simpleton. That’s true, certainly: but then, fascism is a simpleton’s politics, and Campbell took to it wholeheartedly. Having identified himself to the world as a Spanish fascist, Campbell immediately, and with characteristic perversity, declared his essential Britishness and joined the British Army. He served with the King’s African Rifles during the ...”

“... kiss, Africans copulate’). This thorough conspectus of the continent invites comparison with John Gunther’s Inside Africa, a survey done in the last days of colonialism, and, until events overtake it, The Africans should stand, in succession to Gunther, as the most accessible and comprehensive overview of the continent. The twenty-odd years since the ...”

“... that if he was afraid he might go ashore. He then wrote a farewell letter to his wife and took the Blenheim out into the Indian Ocean, where all aboard went down in a cyclone, including Admiral Troubridge. To relieve the roll-call of mass drownings we are given frequent items which shed peculiar light on the seafaring life; as, for instance, the ...”

“... lover, he undid the 16 tiny buttons of her pretty dress and in Judy’s room on Judy’s bed he took her at once without a word. Afterward, having established tenancy, he rewarded her with kisses. But he dressed quickly because he was obligated by the stories of his life to remind her of transience. It is the ex-wife Anna who thinks ...”

“... and in two of her essays she challenged the veracity of Anastasia Tsvetaeva’s memoirs and took issue with Anna Saakiants about her slanted annotations of Tsvetaeva’s writings. These two women’s vitriolic replies to Kudrova’s charges must have alerted the ideological authorities, because nothing more was heard about Irma Kudrova’s ...”

“... ponder on the strange lives of the people who lived in them before the ‘greenhouse effect’ took hold, melted the ice caps, and loosed the overpopulated 21st century’s shaky grip on civilisation. Most of the book is a documentary fiction by one such historian, concerned to explore her theory that in that century the division which all later historians ...”

“... be sure. Emperor Domitian tortured flies; Louis XI did the same to stags; Archduke Franz Ferdinand took pride in having killed more than half a million animals, including the 2150 pieces of small game he bagged in one day and the 3000th stag he shot shortly before Gavrilo Princip shot him. Through the centuries, in Britain and across Europe, cats had the ...”

“... goddess never left the plucky Eisenhower country mapped by these ‘artworks’. Everyone from John Baldessari to the Rev. Howard Finster recombines tulle and Disney, winged sunglasses and King Kongs with the truly scary hairy monster which has been bought 800 million times. The introduction is helpful about that figure: ‘imagine the population of India ...”

“... Still retain I, troubled, shaken, Mean estate, by him forsaken; And this home, which scarcely took Impress from his little look, By his faring to the Dim Grows all eloquent of him. Many things might be praised in this poem: its technical mastery; the distinctiveness of its diction and use of abstractions; the unexpected reversal which has the owner ...”

“... innocent that he was, he failed to twig that walking through the streets of Harlem with Mayor John Lindsay might be interpreted as supporting the political ambitions of a white politician in need of black votes. Rap Brown ‘lambasted me as a shallow liberal poking his nose into a world he didn’t know and in which he didn’t belong’. Brando ...”

“... callers – Edmund Blunden, E.M. Forster, Leonard and Virginia Woolf, H.G. Wells, Rebecca West, John Drink water – and Florence took an eager interest in their conversation. Quick to forget her own afflictions when she sensed greater distress, she did all she could to help Charlotte Mew, whom she pitied and ...”

“... as he gruffly liked to be known). Travis was having a party at his home, and decided to invite John Peel, then the only DJ at Radio 1 with a serious interest in the music he played. Peel, who was much older, and held a far more marginal position in the station’s daily schedule, went along out of curiosity. Looking around Travis’s house he ‘suddenly ...”

“... Oxford philosophy was a competitive business; there were certain prizes that one had to win, the John Locke Prize, the All Souls Fellowship; but Ayer’s fate was to be pipped by his contemporaries, Isaiah Berlin, Goronwy Rees and the slightly younger J.L. Austin. As an undergraduate he had been taken up by Maurice Bowra and acquired a certain celebrity by ...”

“... came his 1948 book The Other Side of the Hill (a quotation from the Duke of Wellington, who told John Wilson Croker that he had ‘spent all his life guessing what was on the other side of the hill’). This was military history from the opposing army’s perspective and with the politics and ethics left out. General Sir Percy Hobart, the most cussed of the ...”

“... 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 ...”