“... heavily on such Western travellers to Mecca as Ludovico de Varthema, Domingo Badia y Leblich, John Lewis Burckhardt and Richard Burton. While most Western reports pretended to be objective, in some cases this was a pretence only, and Peters would have been better advised to have treated Varthema’s 16th-century Itinerario as a novel about oriental ...”

“... innocent that he was, he failed to twig that walking through the streets of Harlem with Mayor John Lindsay might be interpreted as supporting the political ambitions of a white politician in need of black votes. Rap Brown ‘lambasted me as a shallow liberal poking his nose into a world he didn’t know and in which he didn’t belong’. Brando took ...”

“... at Jealousy’ would ideally encompass both the Metaphysical language of Richard Crashaw or John Donne and the invective of a Cockney. The versions by Elaine Feinstein do not convey the rhymes or Tsvetaeva’s rich verbal texture, but they read very well. With irresistible candour, Feinstein explains in the introduction to A Captive Lion what it was ...”

“... services into disrepute. Those former CIA agents who turned against the Agency – Philip Agee, John Stockwell – did so because they were outraged by its behaviour in the Third World. Agee subsequently tried to weaken the Agency in every way he could – but particularly by naming those who worked for it. Yet the gathering of intelligence is still very ...”

“... led to Thorpe’s disgrace and departure, and then to a bitter contest for the succession with John Pardoe, gave David Steel an almost impossible task. He was 39, but looked younger, a slight figure with an easy smile, a son of the Scottish manse, neither obviously at home with scholars, like Grimond, or in London society, like Thorpe. ‘The boy ...”

“... at home and for military defeat abroad. In his compelling biographical and historical study of John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam, Neil Sheehan focuses our attention on this sorry chapter in American foreign affairs. A prize-winning reporter in Saigon for United Press International and the New York Times, Sheehan also won distinction as the journalist ...”

“... declared their Independence, London’s Gentlemen’s Magazine included this brief obituary for John Harrison: ‘He was the most ingenious mechanic, and received the 20,000 pounds reward (from Parliament in London) for the discovery of the longitude.’ In other words, Harrison had invented the technology for measuring, with precision, a long-imagined ...”

“... such as W.C. Wentworth, ‘the lord of the lash and triangle’, Benjamin ‘Flogger’ Boyd and John MacArthur – all of whom we meet with in the narrative – came to control the land, ‘filling it with blood and the suppuration of needless misery’. What keeps this spirit alive, according to Hall, is the complicity of the people, a people who ‘are ...”

“... uncanny faculty of melting’ had become a meltdown. Plath’s doctor during her final months, Dr John Horder, wrote afterwards: My judgment has always been that this was a very determined attempt to end her life ... I believe ... she was liable to large swings of mood, but so excessive that a doctor inevitably thinks in terms of brain chemistry. This does ...”

“... in The Memory of War and in the sometimes, I thought, jejune poems of his collaboration with John Fuller, Partingtime Hall. The novelty in Manila Envelope is that nonsense and ‘light verse’ are yoked to the most harrowing material, and more rigorously than in Auden’s ‘Miss Gee’, for instance, which might otherwise seem a model, because the ...”

“... at 10 Rillington Place, West London, an address later notorious as the home of the mass murderer John Christie. The same Home Secretary, Maxwell Fyfe, by now a ‘charlatan’ with ‘all the arrogance of the truly ignorant’, contended that there had been no miscarriage of justice and was content to believe that by an odd coincidence two murderers had ...”

“... mark is all over this novel, not just in the muscular, shouldering prose style – the style of John Self – but in Ripley’s rich tangle of adolescent preoccupations, his Charles Highway-like obsession with bodily products (‘matutinal lungbung’ in particular), with his own appearance (‘My tasty eyes ... Much is the womanly bullshit that has been ...”

“... tighter stuff than Thompson could provide. (Gold Medal signature-writers of the time included John D. MacDonald, David Goodis and that thriller writer’s thriller writer, Peter Rabe.) So during the late Fifties, when most of his proposed literary projects couldn’t find a buyer, Thompson went on to do some of his best work for Stanley Kubrick’s early ...”

“... IQ to race or class, a fundamentalist approach to biology that has its roots in the Twenties in John Davenport’s testimony to Congress that alcoholism, poverty and avarice are genetically determined traits of Irish, Italian and Jewish populations, respectively. It is easy to criticise such views as ‘standing on a mountain of ash’ (as Pollack ...”

“... callers – Edmund Blunden, E.M. Forster, Leonard and Virginia Woolf, H.G. Wells, Rebecca West, John Drink water – and Florence took an eager interest in their conversation. Quick to forget her own afflictions when she sensed greater distress, she did all she could to help Charlotte Mew, whom she pitied and admired. ‘What a pathetic little creature! She ...”