“... chaplain, Someone fell madly in love with him.’ Eventually, Yossarian the Assyrian bombardier took the role of Someone and eight years later, after an extended gestation about the length of James Joyce’s for Ulysses, Heller published the novel which set the standard he chased for the rest of his life. To the bold query why he never published another ...”

“... are mad, quite mad. But they smiled benignly and were amused. After this, group conversations took place. Playing musical chairs with the Nazis (and letting them win) seems almost too perfect an image for the particular brand of appeasement Astor and her ‘Cliveden set’ embraced. Cliveden in Buckinghamshire had been given to Nancy and her husband ...”

“... Heaney, who were both a few years ahead of him at St Columb’s Catholic Grammar School (where John Hume and Brian Friel had also been pupils), he belonged to the first generation to have access to free secondary schooling after the war. He went to university at Queen’s in Belfast, spent time in London, and by the mid-1960s was back in Derry, fired up by ...”

“... best stories come in Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron by the adventurer Edward John Trelawny, and so are a bit too good to be quite true, but they are evidence of the way Shelley came across. Trelawny’s account of Shelley’s attempt to learn how to swim in a deep pool in the Arno catches the thing very well:He doffed his jacket and ...”

“... was impervious to the language of quiet diplomacy, however firm. Mandela studiously avoided him; John Major agreed only to a preassigned question at a press conference, in response to which he would ask for clemency; and Jim Bolger, the New Zealand host, gave him an audience on condition that he didn’t tell the media, then asked him how his father’s ...”

“... the tradition of Albert Camus’. In every review, it is dutifully reported that Moulessehoul took his feminine nom de plume to avoid military censorship, and that he lives ‘in exile’ in southern France. The impression given is that Khadra is a dissident, rather than a staunch defender of the Algerian army, an institution that bears considerable ...”

“... had given producers – the national ear, and a national role – the post-war rearrangement took away. Like Gibbon’s Roman Empire, Features from its inception was doomed to decline and fall. For some years the fiction of its importance was maintained. The BBC was genuinely proud of its creative writers, its caged lions, among whom the poet MacNeice ...”

“... So we were fed with Swedish folk music, Italian arias, French chansons, German schmaltz and John Philip Sousa. Not so bad actually, because if you put all that together, it becomes what you can hear – well, some of it – on Abba records.To this hodgepodge, known as schlager in its mass-produced pop form, Abba added the Anglo-American songbook ...”

“... that his corpse lay uncorrupted in a chapel for months, so healthy in appearance that one visitor took his pulse in disbelief. Now, the monk’s mechanical likeness, commissioned by a pious king for an impetuous son, would offer similar testimony to the power of saintly bodies. The automaton resides today in the Smithsonian, reminding us of humanity’s ...”

“... entry into the world of international modernity, building on the ‘de-insularisation’ which took place during the Fifties, the breakthroughs of the Sixties and the steady advances of the Seventies and early Eighties. Rather than a meteor arriving out of the blue, the new generation of artists, who first came to public notice in 1988 with the Freeze show ...”

“... dark grey suits (no pinstripes), blue plastic helmets, heavy-duty wellies and – apart from John Prescott – full zip millennial grins. Showcased by a long-focus lens that tactfully blurs the background of industrial dereliction. Britain is Working. Handson management. Optimism. Good humour. That stuff. A cross between a hobbled moon walk and Neil ...”

“... of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. For a time, it worked. The Palestinians took pride in the achievements, however modest, of their young men against a vastly superior Israeli army with superpower weapons. Arafat had received support from the two key anti-Western Arab states, Nasser’s Egypt and Ba’athist Syria. But he had reason to ...”

“... pattern of vines and flowers had been covered up with plain wainscoting long before the Davenants took over the establishment). Honan has one or two soft spots of his own, however: when sifting through the hearsay which accumulated in the years after the playwright’s death he shows a clear preference for material which presents Shakespeare as a ...”

“... was a tough-minded drive to find mechanical explanations. When England’s greatest living poet, John Milton, wanted to explain why we are as we are, he retold the ancient story of Adam’s sin and consequent expulsion from the Garden of Eden. When Alexander Pope wrote his Essay on Man in the following century he took care ...”

“... nuclear deterrent), were thought to be unpopular, and its changes were accepted by John Smith when he succeeded Kinnock as leader after the 1992 election. Smith was not a member of the soft left, however; nor did he anticipate New Labour. The party he led was still recognisably in the British social-democratic tradition; still one in which the ...”