“... In the first volume of his Coleridge biography, Richard Holmes describes Coleridge and Dorothy and William Wordsworth working ‘like plein-air painters, taking elaborate notes on the varied effects of light on the landscape, of plants and water, of wind and cloud and starlight’. They were under surveillance, suspected of Jacobin sympathies ...”

“... father-confessor of the Nixon White House, Ronald Reagan consigliere: is it any wonder that William F. Buckley is still the patron saint of the American right? For more than half a century, he supplied a gloss of coherence and glamour to a movement sorely lacking in both. With his mid-Atlantic drawl and slaloming locutions, he held out the suggestion ...”

“... were insanitary, and the sweetish smell of burning flesh wafted over from the extermination camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Yet on the whole, relations between the townspeople, the ever expanding I.G. Farben factory and the SS cohorts who ran the camp remained cordial. In March 1943, SS officers from the ...”

“... is set out, town by town, guided Jew and Gypsy-hunters to the places where potential concentration camp victims were thickest. Made with similar efficiency, earlier on, is the plan of Nuremberg which shows how contingents to a mighty 1939 Nazi rally would make their way to the stadium. In a colour key to a series of maps of German towns made in the 1940s for ...”

“... by warfare within his own ranks and confronted by a broad alliance of political opponents. Can William Hague draw any comfort from the experience of his similarly beleaguered predecessor Andrew Bonar Law, a scarcely visible figure in the pantheon of Tory leaders? What is best known about him is that he is ‘unknown’. Lord Blake’s celebrated ...”

“... Heren, the veteran foreign correspondent, had hoped to become editor of the Times in succession to William ReesMogg, when Rupert Murdoch bought the newspaper. Heren was told that, at 61, he was too old. Under Harold Evans he failed to flourish (‘Evans trashes me, to use the US Army expression, and most of my former colleagues in his book Good Times, Bad ...”

“... revival as a collective farm in the late Forties, when Mazurin’s release from labour camp coincided with the need to rebuild the kolkhoz on a new location following a decision to start mining coal on the old site. That lasted until 1957, when the kolkhoz was turned into a state farm. There were fresh arrests of Tolstoyan ...”

“... As​ a boy, the Romanian-born artist Avigdor Arikha spent part of the Second World War in a labour camp in western Ukraine, where he was given a small sketchbook and pencil by a sympathetic soldier. A German-speaking Jew, he had been deported with his family; his father had died on the way. The camp at Mogilev-Podolsky was in a destroyed Transnistrian foundry put to use by Siegfried Jagendorf, a Romanian Jewish engineer who turned it into a machine shop serving the local area, and who saved as many lives as he could by employing the internees ...”

“... progress into Afghanistan, the ‘Army of the Indus’ comprised some 16,000 troops and 38,000 camp followers, as well as 30,000 camels and scores of elephants. The Army’s advance was accompanied by the skirling of fifes and the blare of brass bands, and from the arid plains of Afghanistan it raised a dust-cloud hundreds of feet high: it was a grand ...”

“... a purpose. The novel opens with Vesta Gul out for a walk near the disused lakeside Girl Scouts’ camp she has bought and retreated to in the wake of her husband’s death. She discovers, held fast to the forest path by stones, a handwritten note that reads: ‘Her name was Magda. Nobody will ever know who killed her. It wasn’t me. Here is her dead ...”

“... Florida coloured in undecided white) and the Plains states, all coloured in red. The Bush camp complained that the Gore challenge to the Florida count might divide the country, but the electoral map shows that it was already split. Indeed, if you swap red for Rebel grey, the map looks like the Civil War resumed and extended across the board, with an ...”

“... the little that was known, 18th-century antiquaries trusted in Warwickshire gossip, or, like William Ireland, forged what they wanted to find. The display of collective folly was extraordinary, yet the impulse behind it was not strictly fanciful: it stemmed less from a neglect of the facts than an uncontrolled craving to possess them. When Scott ...”

“... Japanese Army in an abandoned teacher training college on the outskirts of Shanghai. ‘The camp lay over a substantial area,’ he writes in his autobiography, Miracles of Life, ‘ringed by a barbed-wire fence through which I often climbed to retrieve a ball or kite. Japanese soldiers patrolled the wire in a rather casual way, and once I had to hide ...”

“... a tendency to sound blasé or deadpan when the imagery becomes surreal. They also share a slightly camp mistrust of ‘angst’, so that where that wheat is unlike, as it were, road-movie wheat is where it’s used to mock a frustrated desire for transcendence. Where Ford differs from O’Hara is in his view of language. O’Hara’s manifesto ...”

“... source. My bias, which I will attempt to overcome, tends towards the more cynical view ascribed to William Burroughs by Jack Kerouac. ‘When you start separating the people from their rivers what have you got? Bureaucracy!’ Having triumphantly ghosted London’s autobiography, Ackroyd’s obvious follow-up was the Thames: generator of life, origin of the ...”