“... moving in front of me. Then I did, and the shock was like stepping on an adder. A clump of heather rose up and stood full height, revealing the figure of a grinning, camouflaged soldier. A platoon of Gurkhas emerged from veils of blaeberry and moss, rifles downwards, to share in the joke. For me, it was an education in the proximate power of the ...”

“... of Africa or opposed the Suez invasion in a famous editorial that described Britain and France as gangsters. What I remember were the things that made us laugh: the column by Paul Jennings that had a tongue-twister about ‘tuskless rustics eating crustless Ruskets’; the strip cartoon by Jules Feiffer; the witty reviews by Kenneth Tynan of plays ...”

“... or Bill Clinton.’The beards were unimpressed. One of the few beardless men in the audience rose to his feet and addressed the Congressman: ‘Please answer honestly to our worries,’ he said. ‘In Afghanistan we helped you defeat the Red Army. You needed us then and we were very much loyal to you. Now you have abandoned us for India. Mr Clinton ...”

“... has a history. In the ancient world, the solitude imposed by power was exile; in 17th-century France, the solitude imposed by power was banishment to the countryside. In a modern office, the solitude created by power is a sense of loneliness in the midst of the mass. In the ancient world, the detached dreamer whom the powerful feared was a Socrates, one ...”

“... refusal to write letters filled with news of the day and his subsequent determination to stay in France once war broke out and become involved in the Resistance. It is hard not to underline the passages where Beckett took pleasure in the image of the Pietà, in pictures of the tearful mother and her headstrong son who was lying finally in her lap, hers at ...”

“... sky seemed to be taking on An ashy blankness, behind which there lay Tonalities of lilac and dusty rose Tarnishing now to something more than dusk, Crepuscular and funerary greys, The streets became more luminous, the world Glinted and shone with an uncanny freshness. The drama in Hecht’s war letters, as the editor points out, is ‘more reminiscent of ...”

“... trauma of bombing and occupation by Allied powers and their mass expulsion from Eastern Europe. France, Poland, Austria and the Netherlands, which had eagerly co-operated with the Nazis, wanted to present themselves as part of a valiant ‘resistance’ to Hitlerism. Too many indecent reminders of complicity existed long after the war ended in 1945. Germany ...”

“... and Freddo were moved to Cadbury’s Bournville plant and Fry’s Chocolate Cream went to Blois in France. In June, the Crunchie bar line and Fry’s Turkish Delight were moved to Poland, followed in September by Curly Wurly, and in December by Chomp, Fudge, Picnic and Double Decker. ‘We watched the last few Double Deckers go through,’ said ...”

“... blew up, but the heat continued. For five days, as the shells whistled overhead on their way to France, I lay in the sun, rinsing out my mouth with Glyco-Thymoline, and worried whether, when the time came, we would have to go over the side and climb down the scrambling nets into the landing-craft, or whether steps would be set up, which we could walk ...”

“... of Meaning. Ogden was at the time editing a weekly paper, The Cambridge Magazine. Its circulation rose to 25,000 and the only way he could solve the paper shortage was to buy books in bulk and pulp them – not, however, before he had looked through them. Ogden believed in being reasonable if he could find a reasonable auditor (‘Will you change your mind if ...”

“... crofters who were rapidly growing in number – the population of the Western Isles, for example, rose by 80 per cent between 1755 and 1821. But while the cottar might move to a nearby town or village to work in the burgeoning textile industry, or enter the new waged economy as a farm labourer, the crofter in the remote north-west had nowhere to go. Instead ...”

“... another well-established move for a Swiss hippie – dropped out to become an Alpine herdsman. He rose at four every morning, milking cows, making cheese, learning to weld, lay bricks, keep bees and stitch his own lederhosen. After four years he tired of cows and moved on to sheep. In the mountains he began the diaries, accompanied by beautiful and meticulous ...”

“... its outcome. After the screening, Herzog was to recall, the two thousand people in the audience ‘rose up with a single voice in an angry roar’ to denounce him for aestheticising the evidence of destruction. Relishing the palpable hostility, he proceeded to claim Dante, Goya, Breughel and Bosch as his models, before concluding with the observation that ...”

“... enough); in any case, his writing didn’t take off, and he gave it up. He had taken snapshots in France, and, almost by accident, he took up the camera again, making abstract pictures of New York street scenes and portraits of his friends. ‘Oh yes,’ he said years later of these beginnings, ‘I was a passionate photographer, and for a while somewhat ...”

“... who hit it off with Henry Kissinger, and is remembered mostly for a misunderstood reply about France (1968 taken for 1789). Beyond these stock images, little further is associated with him. Chen’s new book, a comprehensive portrait of Zhou that took twenty years to research and write, will change that. Born in 1952 in Shanghai, Chen was fourteen when ...”