“... tells Rambo, are holding hostage American prisoners of war. Rambo, who wants to know if ‘we get to win this time,’ thinks his mission is to free the prisoners. But the ‘stinking bureaucrat’ in charge of the covert operation has another agenda. The 1972 peace treaty between the United States and Vietnam, he explains, promised war reparations to ...”

“... 1992. They all hoped for the election of Clinton, because it got rid of the hated ‘moderate’ George Bush and also gave them the ideal Democrat against whom to ‘define’ themselves.) After his triumph last November, I got hold of Gingrich’s doctoral thesis from Tulane University. It was about education policy in the Belgian Congo. Not very well ...”

“... singing Japanese folk songs in a statesman’s suit and a pair of rice farmer’s clogs. We viewers were delighted. After his death, his daughter, an obscure housewife, stumped her father’s old stronghold in jeans and T-shirt and scored 90 per cent of the vote. She has dressed more stylishly for Parliamentary appearances, and is no less ...”

“... the Chinese consulate in downtown Los Angeles, holding placards scarcely anyone notices. But what we commemorate has, unusually, not been forgotten elsewhere. It is now 18 years since soldiers and tanks entered Tiananmen Square in Beijing. Yet every year since then, on the night of 4 June, tens of thousands of people gather in Hong Kong and, whatever the ...”

“... me a right’ – at which Moore is heard to murmur: ‘Oh I agree, I totally agree with that.’ We share Heston’s discombobulation when Moore subtly shifts the tone of the conversation, asking why America has more gun murders than many other countries. ‘We have more mixed ethnicity than some other countries,’ Heston ...”

“... of dirt: a dog crappant on a lawn vert. A supermarket-till cartouche Looping inanely through a bush must have been threaded by some child. No civic wall but is defiled by spraygunned mottoes, jousting cocks – the clichés of the heterodox. The extensions of the conceit are worked out here as thoroughly as in any of the old Elizabethans, and in a fashion ...”

“... threatened to bury me. That was in 1956, when he buried the Hungarian Revolution. In California we welcomed Hungarian victims of Soviet brutality while finding no room for the Guatemalans whose democracy the CIA had crushed two years earlier. We were trained to ignore our victims and to fear our enemy. After ...”

“... differing from deferring. Perhaps Napoleon is to blame (‘Not tonight, Josephine’). In Britain, we do things differently. Whereas Baudelaire’s vrai voyageur preferred travelling joyfully to the letdowns of arrival – in modern terms, couldn’t stop playing with his signifier – Forster’s Mrs Moore remains convinced that there is a real India to make ...”

“... George Saunders’s​ novel Lincoln in the Bardo, which won the Booker Prize in 2017, featured a cast who were mostly dead, though still conversational, and his new novel, Vigil, revisits the device – one that goes back in American literature at least as far as 1915 and Edgar Lee Masters’s poetry collection Spoon River Anthology ...”

“... loose, but I haven’t yet quite got off.’ A few months later Skelton married her next husband, George Weidenfeld. Connolly took to his bed, where his ex-wife, according to Wilson, sometimes brought him a bowl of soup. It was very like Connolly to make an ado of his wife once he had lost her and very like his ex-wife to keep a bloke in hand when the one she ...”

“... novel? Here’s a beginning, with apologies to Sarah Waters and Michel Faber (and a nod to George MacDonald Fraser): London, 1860. November. A pea-souper billowing up from the flotsam bobbing in the Thames. The gas lamps already blearing. Good things of day begin to drowse. The rookeries are emptying, and their birds of prey making wing to the West ...”

“... himself to try to talk him out of it. All he succeeded in doing was securing his lifelong enmity. We know JFK was serious because he went to the trouble of persuading Johnson’s mentor Sam Rayburn, the veteran Texan speaker of the House, to let his man run. Rayburn was adamantly opposed to the idea after what he’d seen happen to another Texan titan, John ...”

“... Arab League. The PAIC meetings attracted people as disparate as the old leftist Palestinian George Habash, members of Hamas, Algerian jihadists and Iraqi Baathists – not to mention Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri. Then, in December 1992, President Bush dispatched the US army to Somalia on what he described as ...”

“... Cooper after him, Irving had taken up his pen partly in response to financial difficulties.) We don’t know which novel Cooper put aside in exasperation in the middle of May 1820, exclaiming ‘I could write you a better book than that myself!’, but by November that year the first of his 32 novels was in print, and he was halfway through his ...”

“... look of blank consternation. He would go off and investigate for himself, and in a few days, when we met again, he would be a crackpot too. Some of these people turn up in The Group. At approximately the same time as Mary McCarthy was chivvying and being chivvied all over Manhattan, Saul Bellow submitted his first short story for publication in the student ...”