“... Security Affairs, to join him in the Pentagon as his special assistant. The Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, had given McNaughton responsibility for co-ordinating strategy towards Vietnam, and he wanted Ellsberg to take charge of the day-to-day details. Ellsberg, then 33 years old, was appointed at the exalted civil service grade of GS-18, equivalent in ...”

“... innocent, primary and bird-happy state, the thing that     In some melodious plot Of beechen green and shadows numberless   Singest of summer in full-throated ease. The strength of the ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ is its power to reconcile – obliquely and naturally, as its shadows suggest sun – two primary human facts, all that is focused in ...”

“... his national service in Puerto Rico. The manuscript was submitted to Simon and Schuster, where Robert Gottlieb, after dickering for two years, eventually turned it down in 1966. By 1969 Toole was an English instructor at Dominican University, working in his spare time on his PhD. A modest academic career seemed likely. But Toole began to behave in a ...”

“... Ms Ortiz Taylor sets up her fiction on much shakier ground – not on the turf of the village green but on the thin crust of earth which protects California from the San Andreas fault. If she also selects a homely simile, it is to pile layer upon layer the pretexts for her heroine’s insecurity: ‘Picture, if you will, a tiny child standing next to her ...”

“... have stood any district but W1 or SW1. Anything near the Harrow Road, or the canal, or Kensal Green cemetery had to be avoided at all costs. My particular cross is to be a “fashionable preacher”, as they say. Bertha is quite right when she says that somebody must minister to the rich.’   ‘Of course,’ said Ianthe. ‘And you have some very ...”

“... story was an aspect of ‘Fright Decade I’, the war against civilisation by terrorists. For Bill Green on the same page of the Post, ‘the Iranian obscenity’ raised the possibility that the ‘freedom of the press’ which presented news about Iran might be ‘perverted into a weapon aimed directly at the heart of American nationalism and ...”

“... when ‘each church recognised the catholicity and independence of the other.’ No easy matter. Robert Runcie, the Archbishop of Canterbury, writes in Old Catholics and Anglicans about the difficulty of trying to be both catholic and independent. But that is what Baxter claimed to be – and thought the Church of England should be. N.H. Keeble has ...”

“... Christopher Booker in the Spectator; Malcolm Muggeridge in the Daily Telegraph; Candida Lycett-Green (who was in love with Ingrams at Oxford, speaks adoringly of him in this book, and once worked for the Eye) in the Standard. Nor are the paper’s smallest private squabbles denied space in the press. Marnham asserts in his book that a change came over ...”

“... elders have his blood. Their fate is in their veins. In the eyes of the mob, the gutter press, the green-ink subscribers to Hatebook and the spite chorus that dances on reputation, they will soon be reckoned fair game: one false move, one barney in a Croxteth pub, one liaison with a granny of the night. These creatures irresistibly recall another unusual ...”

“... Shenzhen, Ollivier found only one set of traffic lights, with the signals ideologically reversed: green for stop and red – the colour of progress – for go. He made good money there and went on to earn a fortune in Africa, a success story he recounts in his 2014 memoir, Ni vu ni connu – a mischievous way of saying ‘I got away with it.’* Ten years ...”

“... unarm’d to th’ hostile Field’:Happy the Man, in whose close Pocket’s found,Whether with Green or Scarlet Ribbon bound,A well made cundum; he nor dreads the IllsOf Cordees, Shanker, Boluses, or Pills;But arm’d thus boldly wages am’rous FightWith Transport-feigning Whore, in Danger’s Spight.Mock-epics aren’t written about real wars, so the ...”

“... on the elephants.Galvanised by the spectacle of the Delta Force failure, and with experience as a Green Beret, paratrooper and mechanised commander, McChrystal rose quickly through the ranks. He was deployed for a few months to Afghanistan in 2002 before returning to serve in the office of the Joint Chiefs as the Pentagon’s debriefer to Congress and the ...”

“... and subsequent move to Milwaukee: Miss Niedecker, I guess in her fifties by now, lives in a tiny green house out at Black Hawk Island . . . Right out in back is the sparkling Rock River, on its way to Lake Koshkonong. No phone, almost no neighbours . . . The river is a major fact in her life – lying there sparkling and running, often flooding and worrying ...”

“... that too when you put them almost in the manner of riddles for you tell me nothing relative to the green substance which you sent me or where it came from or under what circumstances found[.]’ All this from a man who was the archetype of a heroic loner according to his earliest biographers, John Tyndall, his friend and colleague, and J.H. Gladstone, a ...”

“... et misères at the Musée d’Orsay, given a red-plush overall design by the opera director Robert Carsen, is a vast and sprawling show: aesthetic, sociological and historical, from high-end paintings to low-end memorabilia (police reports, brothel calling cards, and a ferocious gimletty prodder which, as far as I could work out, was for puncturing a ...”