“... Democratic National Convention and to liberate eight thousand Confederate prisoners at nearby Camp Douglas. Lincoln convened a military tribunal to punish these men, but the Supreme Court stopped the process cold. The conspiracy occurred in Indiana, which was not a war zone. Since the civil courts were open, the Justices unanimously required the President to ...”

“... of a showdown with Saddam. ‘In crafting a strategy for Iraq,’ the undersecretary of defense Douglas Feith insisted to one baffled US general, ‘we cannot accept surrender.’ The object of the exercise was to demolish constraints on the subsequent employment of American power. Merely promulgating a doctrine of preventive war would not be enough: it was ...”

“... death.Longley’s achievement was not the product of anything like self-assurance. ‘Almost every day, like needing Vitamin C,’ Edna Longley wrote of her late husband, ‘Michael would ask: “Am I a good poet?” And I would reassure him, perhaps adding: “and a great poet”.’ That Longley repeatedly sought confirmation suggests something fruitfully ...”

“... slavery so much as ‘economic disagreements’. This extrusion from the ideology of the modern-day Republican Party of the sentiment of constitutional equality – the right of equal treatment under the law, and the justice, as Lincoln put it, of lifting the ‘artificial weights from all shoulders’ – must be accounted one of the strangest twists in ...”

“... open to all, as the Press quite obviously was not.’ D.G. Bridson, Laurence Gilliam, Jack Dillon, Douglas Cleverdon, Olive Shapley and Joan Littlewood produced programmes which ranged from adaptations of The Waste Land to features on homelessness and unemployment, from the uncompromisingly highbrow to the popular. Their ‘features’ broke away from the ...”

“... that existed in France then, which was enormous.’ Christian Zervos is recollecting the day that Picasso took him, as a favoured confidant, to his vaults in the Banque de France. The fortune Zervos was allowed to glimpse in the mid-1930s had ridden out the Wall Street crash, and had been accumulating since before the First World War. The epithet ...”

“... proprietor – an idea unacceptable to proprietors, who naturally insist that at the end of the day they must have the right to hire or fire their editors whatever intervening stages might have to be gone through. So either the editor must trim his policies to accommodate the wishes of his proprietor, or he must risk being dismissed, unless, of course, he ...”

“... the way to get on was, as they say nowadays, to kiss ass, which Herbert was willing to do all day long. Archer, long past the stage of doing the kissing himself, needed his ass saluted with just that perfectly servile regularity, and although he treated ’Erbert with amused contempt, he was in a slight degree dependent on him. There was a kind of ...”

“... claims his great-granddaddy was). In the unrevised version, an elderly Senator, James Burden Day, a recurring character, is surprised to discover himself still capable of arousal: ‘at a time when he thought himself altogether free of the demands of the flesh, he had become like a boy again, or almost.’ In the rewritten version, ‘it ...”

“... painful In a Year of Thirteen Moons (1978) to the working-class soap Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day (1973) and the TV variety show Like a Bird on a Wire (1975). It is an oeuvre so vast that Penman calls it ‘an entire town, region, conurbation, country; die Fassbinderrepublik’. Its revolving cast of actors and the alternately sickly sweet and dissonant ...”

“... At the height of his passion for Ottoline Morrell, he wrote her three or more times a day: on a train journey to stay with the mathematician A. N. Whitehead in the West Country, he posted one letter at Reading and another at Marlborough, before writing another from the Whitehead’s house. Admittedly that was shortly after he had celebrated ...”

“... Koss has no time to stop and help you. Matters become easier as the book approaches the present day. This is partly, of course, because Koss is moving into the zone lit up by our own memories. But I think it is also because his own herdsmanship improves: he writes with even more spirit and bite, and expresses more opinions. Perhaps, as he nears the ...”

“... archive, after Shakespeare and Freud. Here Karl Miller’s memories of the paper in her day are accompanied by extracts from some of the pieces published at the time. On the morning Margaret Thatcher’s death was announced, the lesser lights of television who were minding the shop did her proud. A river of bittersweet hyperbole flowed by, as the ...”

“... two of the eight men in the room. A third died on the way to hospital. Two more died the following day. But of the three survivors, two had not even lost consciousness. The last was out of hospital after 19 days. Zuckerman understood something that the Germans did not understand: that casualties varied inversely according to the size of the weapon. Ton for ...”

“... story sense’. He had developed the habit of going to the movies every day after he was fired from Mother Jones. More startlingly, this lumbering man had what it took to be a movie star. Rafferty had advised him it would be ‘absolutely a mistake to put himself in the film, that it wouldn’t work. It was the worst piece of advice ...”