“... meanwhile, shows his customary tendency to metamorphose into an indeterminate life-form. ‘He took her hand and put it on his penis. The hot sticky organ was already beginning to rise and fill. It moved under her touch like an animal.’ A field mouse? A boa constrictor? Receiving the benefit of Stash’s extensive sexual education, Francesca conceives ...”

“... have an integrity and persistence of their own. Academic historians such as Maurice Cowling and John Vincent have for years been plotting the political seduction of the aspiring middle classes into primrose leagues. It was all in Bagehot anyway. Similarly it is striking, but in some ways rather pathetic, to discover a Marxist such as Philip Corrigan ...”

“... the inevitable moderating influence of power (a liberal view that the Manchester Guardian once took when Hitler became Chancellor) and about socialism as the rhetoric of the Labour Party. There was even a hasty attempt to redraw Michael Foot as a moderate, a nice old thing who had had a wild youth, a sheep in wolf’s clothing. This reappraisal, however ...”

“... the book is more straightforward and positive. Mailer speaks of him as ‘the only man who never took advantage of Marilyn’; though he also had other commitments, and seems to have realised that he could not, in any case, save her from her host of psychic demons. What Greene could do was capture some classic images of Marilyn’s incarnation as sexual myth ...”

“... attempted election grab of 2020-21 has been described as ‘a coup in search of a legal theory’: John Eastman, the director of the Claremont Centre for Constitutional Jurisprudence, provided the theory in a legal memo that exaggerated the constitutional role of the then vice president, Mike Pence, in the congressional counting of Electoral College ...”

“... of the Jews in Germany. Nor is there any premonition in the book of Charlotte’s own death, which took place in Auschwitz in 1943. She ends the story triumphantly, rejecting the temptation of suicide and determined, ‘alone with her experiences and her paint brush’, to produce the present work. Her state of mind at the end is largely due to the ideas of an ...”

“... that might only be because his epigones have been talking in funny voices ever since. Later on, John Cleese made an almost comparable impact, in the sense that he, too, had clearly got his originality fully worked out in advance. But for everyone else, humour was a craft to be learned, even if the talent was unmistakable. Indeed it can be said that the ...”

“... Buenos Aires, hoping to fly on across the Andes, there was good news and bad. Michael Brunson and John Humphrys had hired a large plane from Aerolineas Argentinas, on behalf of ITN and the BBC, and they were leaving for Santiago late that night. The new Chilean authorities had promised to open the frontier the following morning, and for a payment of ...”

“... about these leonine adventures (which led to Cobb’s forced retirement in August 1938) was Dr John Colin Carothers, the central figure in this study. McCulloch came to know Carothers while working on this book and the retired psychiatrist provided him with access to much material as well as allowing himself to be interviewed. We may assume that much of ...”

“... concerns elsewhere, the north-eastern front posed serious problems for the PMAC from the moment it took power. A disastrous Ethiopian campaign in the spring of 1976 was followed by an Eritrean offensive at the end of the year. The Eritreans went on to take all the key towns in the territory except for Assab in the south and Asmara, the territorial ...”

“... was Diana Mosley, Sir Oswald’s wife. As the Windsors and the Mosleys grew old in exile, they took regular solace together, meeting and dining twice a week and musing about the great times they could have had if only the British had seen sense and sided with Hitler and Mussolini against the Reds. Of all the bonds which united this dreadful woman to the ...”

“... There were closer friends who shunned him: Beardsley, for instance, who owed him so much; John Gray, an early lover, for whose Silverpoints, prettiest of Nineties poetry-books, Wilde had paid; Lilly Langtry, to whom he had, at one time, brought a daily lily, and who claimed to have sent him money without having actually done so. Beerbohm did not spurn ...”

“... neglects to mention Fidel Castro’s claim, made to Kenneth Tynan and cited in Meyers, that ‘we took For whom the bell tolls to the hills with us, and it taught us about guerrilla warfare.’ Indeed, Lynn says nothing about Castro, or his relationship with the celebrated writer living in his country. The oddest lacuna of this kind, though, comes in his ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... as another form of inter-species conflict. For centuries, Jews had been likened to animals: John Chrysostom had placed them at ‘the level of the lusty goat and the pig’; in the influential 19th-century anti-Semitic novel Biarritz, they were described as having ‘the tenacity of a snake, the cunning of a fox, the look of a falcon, the memory of a ...”