“... Dealer. The man who started this frivolous auction was William Safire, former speechwriter to Richard Nixon and now columnist for the New York Times. He it was who, during the dismal days of the Jimmy Carter Presidency, came up with ‘Koreagate’, ‘Peanutgate’, ‘Billygate’ and – his own favourite, concerning some fiddle of government expenses ...”

“... motive for lethal Kennedy-hatred among disaffected CIA and Mafia types, insofar as the two species may be distinguished. The explanation turns out to be relatively simple, and consistent with the known facts. Kennedy was waiting to hear that Castro had been assassinated in Havana. When he didn’t hear, he calmly betrayed the mercenary force as the laws of ...”

“... I had to put money on it, I’d say that the odds on quick success in destroying the Iraqi regime may be as high as 5/1 or more, given US military superiority, the vile nature of Saddam Hussein’s rule, the unreliability of Baghdad’s missiles, and the deep divisions in the Arab world. But at first sight, the longer-term gains for the US look pretty ...”

“... hangers-on, ‘terrorists’ and the occasional gangster. Several of Campbell’s principals – Richard Wright, Samuel Beckett, Jérôme Lindon, Maurice Girodias – also turn up in Lennon’s story, like Balzac’s recurring characters or, less charitably, like figures in some bizarre soap opera. Naturally, the principal locale is the café or the ...”

“... not only Auden’s ‘Letter to Lord Byron’, but also a number of other putative letters (to Richard Crossman and William Coldstream, for instance), MacNeice’s ‘Eclogue from Iceland’, the famously camp prose-piece ‘Hetty to Nancy’, and the joint-authored ‘Last Will and Testament’. According to Auden, MacNeice wrote about eighty of the 240 ...”

“... Richard Evans hopes that this book will take the place of E.H. Carr’s What is History? and G.R. Elton’s The Practice of History as the ‘basic introduction’ to history as taught in the universities. Evans is a self-declared ‘Rankean’ empiricist, committed to Ranke’s view that facts and documents ‘speak for themselves ...”

“... face. My mate Fergus sniggered. He said she had funny wee shoes and legs. I have a feeling she may not remember how the conversation went, but I recorded it for posterity in the back of a school jotter the next day. The Queen: ‘Very hot, isn’t it?’ Fergus: ‘Roastin’.’ The Queen: ‘And have you been cub scouts ...”

“... science. To an alarming degree, theory preempted argument. H.D. had been abandoned by her husband, Richard Aldington, for another woman, during a difficult pregnancy in which mother and child seemed doomed; her love affair with the feminist Bryher was fraught; writing set up its own strains: but Freud already knew, amid this welter of anxieties, what really ...”

“... recognise as one of the ... distinctive characteristics of their own kingdom’. Such chauvinism may say as much about the anxious cultural politics of contemporary France as it does about the history of Poussin scholarship, and yet the underlying concern is not without foundation. The villain of the piece (now typecast by his starring role in other ...”

“... with flashbacks to events of the night before. ‘Call yourself a New Puritan?’ the reader may well indignantly ask, but this isn’t really breaking Rule No.5, because the flashbacks are actually occurring in the narrative’s present in the narrator’s hungover memory (and, as if further mitigation were necessary, one of his drinks was spiked with ...”

“... combined, and John Wayne was in one of them. Orange County is in Southern California, home of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, of Hollywood, Disneyland and John Wayne. Nixon would have lost his home state and the White House in 1968 without his Southern California support. At the 1984 Republican Convention, Reagan, our second Southern California ...”

“... encounters but zero orgasms. Adèle, an attractive Parisian woman in her thirties, with a husband, Richard, a child and a desultory job as a journalist, has what the DSM-5 would describe as a hypersexual disorder, that is, if sex addiction weren’t such a controversial diagnosis that the DSM-5 clinicians decided not to include it. ‘Adèle has been ...”

“... Reddings moved back to Tindall Heights. The year Redding turned 14 was also the year that Little Richard – a Macon native who had made a small name for himself as a gospel singer before switching over to rhythm and blues – recorded ‘Tutti Frutti’. Redding fell in love with the song, and with Little Richard’s ...”

“... our view,’ Eberts continues, ‘it was like Gone with the Wind.’ Only English. Some may feel the massacre at Amritsar was gratuitous violence, but that was English too. The Mission (one Oscar), on the other hand, won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, but failed to pull in audiences. Failed to pull in large enough audiences, that is, in proportion to ...”

“... then were? And yet English biographers, famous for their good judgment of people (which in itself may be a national stereotype, vice or collective delusion), following the good Dr Johnson – ‘I knew that poor wretch Savage’ (probably they drank together on two or three occasions) – commonly do just this: infer fact from fancy. We can become fair judges ...”