“... in an interview, Hoover’s niece said she’d heard ‘Uncle Edgar wasn’t very nice to his father when he was ill. He was ashamed of him. He couldn’t tolerate the fact that granddaddy had mental illness. He never could tolerate anything that was imperfect.’ But he worshipped his mother, who appears in other books as a martinet, and here ...”

“... in the technologies that now capture the lives of animals with unprecedented intimacy. It would be nice to think that we are becoming wiser and more curious about other forms of life. But our curiosity often seems merely to serve human needs. It hardly needs to be said that all is not well with our world. We are disempowered, isolated and (quite ...”

“... friend, Melville said, is someone you can call in the middle of the night to ‘tell him, “Be nice, find your revolver and come immediately,” and to hear him respond, “OK, I’m coming.” Who does that for anyone?’) The casual style of Bob le flambeur looks forward to the Nouvelle Vague, rather than to the pared-down, meticulous thrillers Melville ...”

“... which the book’s Irish reviewers weren’t slow to point out. In an enlightened spirit, Richard Murphy thought the point was that Ireland might be encouraged to shake off such atavism, the book freed ‘us from the myth by portraying it in its true archaic shape and colour, not disguising its brutality’. Other reviewers took the opposite ...”

“... than one appelé was told – ‘going to Algeria is no more dangerous than driving from Paris to Nice.’ (At that time about ten thousand people died every year on the autoroute.) War meant the Battle of Verdun, where more than 160,000 Frenchmen died, and Algeria wasn’t Verdun. The right of conscientious objection wasn’t recognised. Even the Communist ...”

“... Red and Whites several times. His family – skilled working class, not badly off, able to afford nice Sunday suits for the children – briefly retreated to Kursk, in Russia, where Brezhnev joined the Komsomol and then, at 25, the Communist Party. He married Viktoria Petrovna, a midwifery student, and worked as a land manager before the party sent him to the ...”

“... to increase punctiliousness. Don’t be alarmed, there are a few white folks even up here. Nice disagreeable sort of letter isn’t it? Glad you & dad seem to be enjoying life. I don’t suppose anyone can live in books steadily & not get grouched occasionaly. Have seen & heard nothing out-side this cramped narrow lopsided hole except last ...”

“... The tension between party members and elected representatives, however, is congenital in Labour: Richard Crossman observed in 1968 that the nominal sovereignty given to the party conference was vitiated in practice by the freedom given to MPs in matters of political judgment. Perversely, the unremitting attacks from his own MPs made it more difficult, not ...”

“... photographs line the inside cover of Moser’s book like a wall of publicity stills), Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Robert Mapplethorpe, and, later, her partner Annie Leibovitz. Sontag’s post-cancer skunk-stripe hair made her instantly spottable. For those hitting the right places in Manhattan, Sontag sightings were as recurring and oddly reassuring as Warhol ...”

“... singer Johann Michael Vogl, but Schubert would often sing and play his songs himself. He had a nice voice and was a good pianist, but one wonders what these renditions must have sounded like. The technical demands of the song cycles Die schöne Müllerin and Winterreise were especially great. Yet nowhere does one sense the singularity of his talents more ...”

“... the uniform of the tsarist Ministry of Railways!’ he exclaimed as he ushered me in. ‘What a nice thing to see. But why have you no proper winter coat? We have to find you one.’ We never found the coat: Igor, as I later discovered, was an old socialist who was indifferent to material possessions, a point of contrast between him and Irina. But Igor had ...”

“... the 18th century. The Thanksgiving Service at St Paul’s did not have to be invented: it’s a nice conclusion to the King’s illness and needed no departure from historical truth. Beginning my career as an historian, I find it harder to take liberties with the truth than someone whose upbringing has been less factually inhibited. I have to be forced into ...”

“... tells us he agreed to become Washington’s surrogate because the State Department honcho, Richard Armitage, threatened to bomb Pakistan back to the Stone Age if he didn’t. What really worried Islamabad, however, was a threat Musharraf doesn’t mention: if Pakistan refused, the US would have used Indian bases. Musharraf was initially popular in ...”

“... same height and weight as Byrne in order to maintain verisimilitude’.In his 1959 biography, Richard Ellmann reported that Joyce ‘often agreed with Vico that “imagination is nothing but the working over of what is remembered.”’ Ellmann also quotes Joyce’s remark to Frank Budgen: ‘Imagination is memory.’ Budgen, whom Joyce met in Zurich in ...”

“... Eleanor Ward also noticed the change: ‘Suddenly, I discovered that everyone had very good, nice, new teeth.’The work Warhol was doing for shop windows didn’t immediately generate the same kudos. But it would, with very little adaptation. ‘What almost nobody in 1961 would have seen, had they passed the window at Bonwit Teller,’ Arthur Danto ...”