“... of Cape Town and Table Mountain. Among those who have bought houses here are Earl Spencer, Elton John and Michael Douglas, but the oddity is that, while you might assume, as you drive through its wonderful avenues, that Constantia’s residents are nothing if not respectable, you’d be dead wrong, because not only did Mark set himself up in palatial style ...”

“... he will speak pornographically about guns, rifles, rockets and weapons systems; he will deploy a freely offensive shorthand about everybody from the ‘Muj’ – the Mujahideen – to rag-headed Iraqi insurgents, knocking off a few corrupt Russians, useless journalists, greasy Serbs and ‘sound as a pound’ Scousers along the way. Sentimentality is the ...”

“... worked in the dining-room, where her four daughters, servants, relatives and friends came and went freely. Long passages of narrative summary sometimes take the energy out of her work, as if she had been distracted for a while; characters are occasionally put on hold for chapters. But when it came to beginning a book or producing its central confrontational ...”

“... the use of the bomb, while the 31 August 1946 issue of the New Yorker had been entirely devoted to John Hersey’s unsparing account of what the nuclear attack had meant for civilians in Hiroshima. Stimson’s 7300-word testimonial – which was in fact written by McGeorge Bundy, later national security adviser to Kennedy and Johnson, with input and edits from ...”

“... Sciences Research Council and a vocal critic of America’s war in Iraq. When Habib arrived at John F. Kennedy International Airport in October 2006, border officials interrogated him at length, asking questions about an anti-war rally he had attended, and told him his visa had been cancelled. I was then an attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union ...”

“... ignorant, the most bigoted, the most superstitious of all the Roman Catholics in Christendom,’ John Adams, the second American president, wrote in 1815. The notion that they could form a ‘confederation of free governments’, as the Venezuelan revolutionary Francisco de Miranda had proposed, was as ‘absurd as similar plans would be to establish ...”

“... to deliver the Tanner Lectures, on which the book is based. Mise en abyme, anyone?). The son is John Bernard, who teaches at Appleton and is not pleased at the prospect of being reunited with his mother, a militant vegetarian. He tells her: ‘I haven’t had time to make sense of why you have become so intense about the animal business.’ On her ...”

“... Modernity has no monopoly over scepticism. Supernatural agency was hotly debated and critics freely dismissed magic as fraud and delusion. From the early Christian church came the bogus levitator Simon Magus, a cautionary tale that endured for hundreds of years. His name links him to the priesthood of ancient Persia (and the wise men at the Nativity) but ...”

“... who announced that they had administered appropriate medication, that the King had vomited freely, and that his copious evacuations were ‘bilious and brown’. Why not cut out the middlemen, one (radical, nasty) journalist said, and just bring in the royal chamberpot so we can all have a look? After the coup of August 1792 the family found themselves ...”

“... Schuyler had an inkling. Having been introduced to the audience at the Dia Art Foundation by John Ashbery, he read from his newly published Selected Poems, on the back cover of which Ashbery’s blurb declared: ‘Schuyler is simply the best we have.’He began the reading that night with the first poem he ever published, ‘Salute’, written in 1951 ...”

“... over for the last forty years of his life and failed to finish. When his literary executor John Callahan appended some of these jottings to the end of ‘Juneteenth’, the ‘novel’ he extracted from two thousand manuscript pages, he gave Ellison the last word: the final note reproaches the editor from beyond the grave, along with the readers ...”

“... out, these concerns are not new. In 1875, less than ten years after the movement was founded, Sir John Strachey, a senior British colonialist, asked his colleague John Palmer to infiltrate the madrasa at Deoband and to report back on what he found there. Having taken a look Palmer concluded: ‘there cannot be a better ...”

“... if he was charged with representing as his real life what was an outright lie.May I quote John Updike? Asked about my Zuckerman books, he said to an interviewer: ‘Roth’s inventing what looks like a roman à clef but is not.’But if your books are misread, other than by John Updike, isn’t that more or less the ...”

“... diaries, which Tynan bequeathed on his deathbed to his daughter Tracy. They have been edited by John Lahr, the perfect choice for the task – indeed, an inescapable one. Lahr is Tynan’s true successor at the New Yorker, reviewing theatre for the magazine, as did Tynan, and, more important, filling his loafers as its premier celebrity profile writer, its ...”

“... includes a dozen of them, mostly in their entirety.Interest in his life is sharpening. After John Stuart Roberts’s compact and readable single volume of 1999, we now have Jean Moorcroft Wilson’s double-header, with Max Egremont’s somewhat shorter Life expected soon. Sassoon’s story has also reached a wider audience through television re-creations ...”