“... named for the segregated air base in Alabama where they trained, broke the colour bar. But it took them two years – far longer than white aviators – to be deployed to Europe. There, the white head of their combat group, convinced that Blacks lacked the capacity for aerial warfare, at first kept them hundreds of miles from the battle zone. But the ...”

“... had tamed the discretionary Keynesian monster. As Blinder sees it, this is baloney. When Volcker took over the Fed, the monetarists’ stable relationship between money and economic activity was nowhere to be found. He did not generate the anti-inflationary recession of the early 1980s through a vigilant targeting of money growth, which proved to be both a ...”

“... inferior and the incurably insecure. Kissinger belongs more to the second category. It took him a while to nerve himself, but having experienced the thrill of ordering and administering murder he was unable to get his fill of it. He grew sleek and satisfied, and more confident. He began to chafe at the status of number two. He began to slather his ...”

“... others have covered it adequately, but he is not short of material, having had access to the John Fitzgerald Kennedy Library (where Hadley’s letters, alas without Ernest’s thousandfold replies, are stored) and many other major collections; indeed all the biographers appear to have been received with unusual generosity by the Hemingway family and the ...”

“... but even here his illuminating suggestions must be weighed against the distinguished essay by John Creaser in the Lindley volume which points, heretically and convincingly, to the ‘royalism’ of Comus, or at least of the occasion for which it was written. The radicals were apparently against ‘authoritarianism’ – but who was more authoritarian ...”

“... 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 ...”