“... were more like secretive commandos. They drove nails into trees to slow up logging and published a field guide to ‘ecotage’ (environmentalist sabotage), also known as ‘monkey-wrenching’. In the words of one Earth First! figurehead, their derring-do actions were undertaken in the ‘self-defence of the wild’, an intriguing syllogism. There was no plan ...”

“... want to talk to talk to everybody I can as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night.At 17, she had told her journal: ‘I think I would like to call myself “The girl who wanted to be God”.’ And she would retain this intensity across her whole career. When I first read Plath at 17, though I ...”

“... since 1879 with the ‘stars and bars’: the blue and white cross of St Andrew on an in-your-face field of bright red. Its Civil War service done, this banner had rallied the Ku Klux Klan as it helped re-establish white power in the South during a half-century reign of terror. When, in 1993, the then Georgia Governor asked the legislature to remove this none ...”

“... CIA involvement in its finances, another idea came up. Some of those figures like Stephen Spender, Frank Kermode and Stuart Hampshire wanted to start a counter-magazine.I don’t think ‘Encounter’ had folded by then.No, it hadn’t but Spender had left. Spender was a big figure in the CIA controversy. So the projected magazine would be a counter-Encounter ...”

“... out, we believe, by Lieutenant-Colonel Derek Wilford on lines of thinking propounded by Brigadier Frank Kitson, British Army counter-insurgency expert – was based on the military principle that the way to bring your enemy to battle is to attack something that, for prestige reasons, he will have to defend: the Germans attacking Verdun in the First World War ...”

“... restaurant someone had recommended. The cavernous room was empty except for a life-sized figure of Frank Sinatra and a solitary waiter drinking at a banquette. He stood up as I entered and promptly keeled over, landing flat on his face. Recovering himself, he brought me the wrong drink followed by the wrong meal. I saw him the next morning at the ...”

“... where my fingers were straying. Here were the memoirs of a few dandies of the turn of the century, Frank Harris and Boni de Castellane, and a copy of the commonplace book of the mysterious Comtesse Diane, but it was the books on the left-hand side of the shelf to which destiny was leading me. Slowly I crossed my right hand over my left hand, and, after the ...”

“... somewhere. ‘The person who experiences greatness must have a feeling for the myth he is in,’ Frank Herbert wrote in Dune, Wright’s favourite novel as a teenager. ‘Dune was really about people,’ Wright told me. ‘It was about the idea that we don’t want to leave things to machines and [should instead] develop as humans. But I see things a little ...”