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“... that forms its own truth condition, as when politicians dispense reassurance to the markets in the hope that what they say will be self-verifying. Creating confidence while ostensibly reporting it is a kind of power, which itself depends on trust. As with the run on Northern Rock, the stratagem fails when people lose grounds for confidence in ...”

“... a Stuart restoration, proposed increasingly desperate and authoritarian compromises in the vain hope of staving it off. Anyone under the impression that Milton’s stirring denunciations of tyranny stem from a democratising spirit should remember that he also wrote these lines for Jesus in Paradise Regained: For what is glory but the blaze of fame, The ...”

“... troops we are bound to break through.’ That same month he recorded a conversation with Colonel Charles à Court Repington, military correspondent of the Times, in which he said that ‘as soon as we were supplied with ample artillery ammunition of high explosive, I thought we could walk through the German lines at several places.’ In March ...”

“... breakaway state of Katanga in the Congo against the UN, and it strongly supported Biafra in the hope of breaking up Nigeria, the dominant Anglophone state in West Africa. Sometimes this almost led to open clashes between the powers. In 1964 a coup against Leon M’ba in Gabon was blamed on the CIA; when French troops intervened to reinstate M’ba, American ...”

“... Essex. 7. 1828, month unknown. Shot at Holme-on-Spalding-Moor, Yorkshire, by the keeper of Lord Charles Stourton. 8. 1840, month unknown. Caught in a state of exhaustion near Marshchapel in North Lincolnshire. 9. 1841, 21 December. Shot at Margate, Kent, by a boy ‘employed in keeping crows’; sold to a dealer for fourpence, then exhibited in Margate ...”

“... a medallion, designed by his best modellers. In this classicised allegory of colonial success, Hope, a young woman in flowing robes, reaches out to Peace with her olive branch, Art with her palette, and Labour, with a sledgehammer over his shoulder. A ship in the background shows the arrival of the colonists while a horn of plenty spills its contents onto ...”

“... judge agreed.AB’s lawyers enlisted me as an expert witness before his appeal was heard in the hope that I’d add weight to their argument on the last of the three grounds, the obstacles to his integration in Jamaica. I’ve been conducting research into the lives of deported people there for several years and have published a book on the subject. Like ...”

“... the club, or the pub, or at some crappy dinner party? On the face of it, no thank you. The faint hope might have been that, in writing directly about himself, the irascible old shag would come over as somewhat, shall we say, cuddlier than his usual public image makes him seem. To any such tender expectations, though, Amis offers here a close-to-gleeful ‘In ...”

“... the mayor. Lindbergh was 25. Two years later he married Anne Morrow, and on 1 March 1932 their son Charles Augustus junior was kidnapped from their home near Hopewell, New Jersey. Three months after that, the baby was found murdered in nearby woods. In early 1935, at the ‘trial of the century’ at Flemington, New Jersey, Lindbergh took the stand to give ...”

“... The failure of the Council’s literature policies cannot be attributed to popular opinion. Since Charles Osborne was for a long time the director of the Literature Department, we might expect to find the true explanation of its demise in his memoirs, the first fruits of his leisure in early retirement.† There is an odd devil in Mr Osborne which is always ...”

“... of her parents’ choice and given her envoi with an illegal but obligatory dowry which she must hope will be big enough to keep her in-laws satisfied long enough for her to produce a son. If she fails in both these respects and has fallen among particularly primitive folk she might feature in one of those sad little paragraphs in my morning newspaper ...”

“... at the end of each year, begins, politely and a bit tentatively, in March 1958: ‘Dear Guy, I hope subsequent activities haven’t yet sufficed to obliterate our Boston dinner last fall from your memory.’ The two had crossed paths five years earlier, when they both gave papers on Pound at Columbia, and met again for dinner in 1957. Kenner was writing ...”

“... great swathes of enemy countryside, and some men served as mercenaries and adventurers in the hope of plunder – farm labourers and yeomen, unused to the realities of war, could easily panic under fire, and desertion and mutiny were common. In 1523 one body of troops in an English army chanted ‘Home, Home’ while another chanted in ...”

“... received £1000 from that account, as did Bottomley’s horse trainer. Bottomley gave £1100 to Charles Palmer, who had been deputy editor of John Bull and who won an unexpected by-election victory in 1920 with Bottomley’s backing; a further £4800 went to an actress called Peggy Primrose, one of Bottomley’s longer-standing mistresses. Payments ...”

“... camera crew for a floor she’d cracked herself, for example, and regularly stiffing the couturier Charles James, even as she was politically generous and admirable, donating her time and efforts to an endless parade of left-wing causes. Gypsy’s most famous act was called ‘A Stripteaser’s Education’. In it, she would undress while saying ‘I’m ...”