“... on the overthrow of the Iranian government in 1953, carried out in the interests of BP. In 2000, James Risen of the New York Times explained: When the Central Intelligence Agency helped overthrow Muhammad Mossadegh as Iran’s prime minister in 1953, ensuring another 25 years of rule for Shah Muhammad Reza Pahlavi, the CIA was already figuring that its ...”

“... People would ring the doorbell to ask about Stevenson, and they still do. John remembers James Pope Hennessy turning up when he was writing his book about RLS. ‘He was busy turning down a knighthood at the time,’ Mr Macfie said. ‘And I think they were keen to give it to him in thanks for all he hadn’t written about Queen Mary.’ Macfie’s ...”

“... on realist prose and painting, and his new book is a commentary on Emerson, Whitman, Melville, James and Twain, among others, with significant asides on Thomas Eakins and Winslow Homer. It aims to look freshly at these artists and to ask again why their originality matters. Names like Stevens, Eliot and Ashbery are frequently dropped and sometimes ...”

“... That’s an understatement. It was on the day of Oscar Hornung’s birth, 24 March 1895, that Frank Harris met Wilde at the Café Royal and advised him to drop his libel suit against Lord Queensberry. Ten days later, the disastrous libel suit opened at the Old Bailey, and only three weeks after that, Wilde was himself in the dock. Would you really want to ...”

“... is free.’ But Padmore wasn’t in the mood to celebrate. Much to their surprise, as Leslie James recounts in George Padmore and Decolonisation from Below (2014), Padmore and Pizer had found themselves flying to Ghana ‘on a VIP plane with former British governors, the British parliamentary delegation, the Norwegian ambassador and delegations from ...”

“... It was​ in a Quonset hut south of the Potomac that Peter Matthiessen met James Jesus Angleton, ‘a cadaverous, hawk-boned man with dark hair, large elfin ears and a lively intelligent face behind horn-rimmed glasses’, as Matthiessen later described him in an unpublished account of his recruitment to the CIA in the autumn of 1950 ...”

“... explained, there would be no further investigation: he had to prioritise present-day crimes. Such frank admissions are surely rare, most likely drawn out of Jeffrey as his way of honouring Lukhanyo as his father’s son. Even those who see the forfeit of criminal justice by the commission as a historic error, or who argue, in the face of that critique, that ...”

“... ear and with a grease spot on his vest, who refuses to engage either in intellectual chat about James Joyce or religious debate about the identity of God. A bird-shaped stain on the ceiling above Asbury’s bed assumes the role of spiritual catalyst at the story’s conclusion, tearing ‘the last film of illusion’ from his eyes and bringing him face to ...”

“... raised uncomfortable questions. She was more at home debating ideological niceties with Hugh James, who ‘took up the orthodox Bolshevik position … that I should not think in analogies as it was dangerous … he is excellent fun to argue with.’ Non-Oxford people were less satisfactory. The ‘hearty old couple’ the troupe stayed with near Water ...”

“... for Bush, Nader became a scapegoat for Democrats. ‘I will not speak his name,’ the strategist James Carville said. Nader himself remained unmoved; he ran again in 2004 and 2008. Along with these quixotic campaigns, he continued to sponsor citizen groups with agendas ranging from protecting Americans with disabilities to filing tort claims against ...”

“... the NSA. The programme was called SHAMROCK, and it persisted until the late 1970s, when Senator Frank Church started investigating the NSA’s activities, declaring them to be potentially intrusive on the lives of ordinary Americans. Church’s high-profile investigations led to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, a law which seemed to give ...”

“... British readers like myself – the majority, I suspect – for whom Peru is an unknown country. James Michener could brief us in a heavy-handed tutorial prelude on South American politics. But Shakespeare has chosen an artful form of narrative that cannot carry any great burden of exposition. I wish that Collins had appended ‘In Pursuit of Guzman’ to ...”

“... a Louisiana Rimbaud. Sooner or later someone will ‘discover’ that like Elvis, Jim Morrison and James Dean he still lives. But one hopes that Kenneth Holditch or someone else who can get at the facts will some day write a full and historical account of the young man’s doomed life, his works and their posthumous career. Mordecai Richler has published only ...”

“... of those in his books but used to develop a style and practise a phrase. He looks for Henry James’s Prefaces in a bookshop, draws a blank and tries another shop over Waterloo Bridge; enjoys a salmon sandwich and a cup of coffee, and has the satisfaction of getting to the motor-coach station with ten minutes to spare. A maiden lady’s visit to the ...”

“... the impetuous, supercharged narrative manner of Virginia Woolf, or the cumulative music of Henry James. Where syntax and the overall shaping of a sentence are concerned, Clampitt can match both these supreme artists in the way she reflects the state of an enquiring or apprehending mind by means of the fits and starts of individual phrases and clauses, the ...”