“... was a reservoir of malice, poison and vicious sadism in my soul, and it poured forth freely in the jungles and rice paddies of Vietnam,’ says the narrator of the title story: ‘I committed unspeakable crimes and got medals for it.’ Jones is not much concerned with the cultural or ideological dimensions of the war, beyond noting the bizarre ...”

“... attachment to the conditions of their misery makes it difficult for them to develop happily and freely and without multiplying more misery around them. Dina, Yehuda’s hypnotically beautiful daughter-in-law, is still a virgin. She cannot break through her sexual inhibitions, consummate her marriage and have a child, because she needs her frigidity to ...”

“... Fred happens to be married to Zimmern’s daughter Roo; his trip to London to research into John Gay starts badly because he and Roo have quarrelled, and he has had to come to London without her. Arriving in damp mid-winter, he at first has to rely on the company of an American academic couple, the Vogelers, who are dispirited by the climate and by ...”

“... while he was working on Found: This morning, Gabriel not yet having done his cart & talking quite freely about several days yet, having been here since the first Novr & not seeming to notice any hints, moreover the two children being here & one stupid girl insufficient for so much work Emma being within a week or two of her confinement & he having had his bed ...”

“... creation became the basis for Scientology’s recruitment of Hollywood celebrities – Tom Cruise, John Travolta, Juliette Lewis, Kirstie Alley, Peaches Geldof – who serve as evidence that the religion makes the ‘able more able’. Even William Burroughs, during his brief stint in the church, was featured in Freedom bragging that he’d become a more ...”

“... who was also a fascist; next, as her stardom dawned, a Hollywood screenwriter; then an actor, John Loder, father of her two children; next, a nightclub owner; a Texas oilman; and finally her own divorce lawyer. She spent her last three decades alone. In Florida, where she died in 2000, her most ‘enduring’ friendship, according to Barton, was with a ...”

“... of communist demands for the institution of a powerful de Gaulle-style presidency in return for a freely elected senate, which Solidarity could control. This deal, as Ackerman says, ‘made short-term sense. But it was a disaster in the middle run, once Solidarity had swept the communists from their dominant position in the other branches.’ When Solidarity ...”

“... J.P. Gell was dispatched in 1839 to start up the interdenominational Christ’s College at Hobart; John Buckland followed in 1846 to be headmaster of the Hutchins School. In his uncertainties over employment Clough kept open the antipodean possibility, making an unsuccessful application for a chair of Classics at Sydney in 1851. J.A. Froude, after the ritual ...”

“... was active in her twenties and thirties in radical political circles, and along with her husband, John Fenwick, an Irish patriot and member of the London Corresponding Society, became friends with William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft around the time of the French Revolution. One of the few – haunting – pieces of biographical information we have about ...”

“... romancing the wonderful indifference of nature and its heroic explorers. Indeed, the loss of Sir John Franklin and his party during his search for the Northwest Passage in the 1840s only further fuelled the imaginative drama of the ice. Lady Jane Franklin, reminding the nation of her husband’s heroism with her own heroic bearing, whipped up sympathy and ...”

“... was another example – where the normal precautions must be set aside. Thus, torture was freely used to extract confessions to such impossibilities as flying through the air to attend the sabbat. Through torture one suspect could be forced to incriminate large numbers of others, and an enthusiastic judge, a skilled hangman or an anxious ruler (Bishop ...”

“... for the world, since it is God who lies at the source of that freedom, and who has factored in my freely chosen actions. God did not force me to dress up as a parlourmaid and call myself Milly last Friday; but being omniscient, he knew that I would, and could thus shape his cosmic schemes with last Friday’s Milly business well in mind. There is no stopping ...”

“... Museum) and the National Gallery. Piero della Francesca was a figure of special interest for both John Charles Robinson, an agent for South Kensington as well as for private collectors, and Charles Eastlake, the first director of the National Gallery, because of the extreme rarity of his portable pictures. There was only one work by him in any public – or ...”

“... eating. A number of summers ago my friend Eli and I had dinner at a trendy downtown pizza place (John F. Kennedy Jr was at the next table). After we’d finished, and I was halfway out the door, Eli called me back, in a strangely delighted tone of voice, to show me the dead, foot-long sewer rat (grey, oily belly distended, chest flattened, long yellow ...”

“... communication and conversation.’ But precisely because coffee houses were places where people freely spoke their minds on matters that were supposed to be none of their business, they were fertile fields for government spies. By the 1670s and 1680s, London’s coffee houses were swarming with informants, notably including their owners, who were ...”