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“... without even looking at the other asked: “What are you going to have?” Scott turned pea-green and, putting his hand to his mouth, rushed for the great outdoors.’ The twins were in the studio to work on a film called Freaks, made by Tod Browning, who had just directed Dracula with Bela Lugosi. In their 1995 book Dark Carnival: The Secret World of ...”

“... writhing in the throes of a midlife crisis and sexual combat (‘What do [women] want? They eat green salad and drink human blood’), composes feverish letters to current lovers and dead philosophers – was a landmark moment in the power-lifting of Jewish-American fiction. ‘Over the past ten or 15 years,’ Julian Moynihan announced in the New York ...”

“... Dissenters quilted in lichen. Obelisks and stone tanks husbanded behind iron fencing. Flocculent green stuff glowing luminously beneath the white skin of Bunyan’s effigy. I expected, against all foreknowledge, to run into Ackroyd here. To get his word on all this. But that was not to be. Business folk hustled through, using the graveyard path as a short ...”

“... had to be warned off, kept at bay. I desired the hitherto unattainable – to be left alone: what Henry James once described as ‘uncontested possession of the long, sweet, stupid day’: that peace to which no living creature has a natural right. Yes, for a time I was decidedly neurotic on the subject of my friends. I even imagined a kinship with Dorothy ...”

“... at one time or another – Locke, Spinoza, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Fichte, Hegel, Comte, Marx, Green, Bradley and Bosanquet pave the way for the ‘great, disciplined, authoritarian structures’ in which positive freedom eventually came to be pursued. The evidence for these connections is essentially circular: modern despotism proves the dangers of the ...”

“... most primitive fears of the white racist imagination were not held only by defenders of slavery. Henry A. Wise, a Southern member of Congress and a future Confederate general, called John Quincy Adams ‘the acutest, the astutest, the archest enemy of Southern slavery that ever existed’. Adams would have subscribed to the view that ‘all men are created ...”

“... who have used you for their own childish, destructive purposes.In quoting from this letter in ‘Green Sore’, Lowell made a small but significant alteration. Instead of ‘I don’t entirely wish you well, far from it, of course,’ the line reads: ‘not that I wish you entirely well, far from it’. In its original context, which is almost ...”

“... book is a document of the way the architects involved saw this process. Keeling House, Bethnal Green Bruno Ahrends, like so many German-Jewish emigrés, was interned at the start of the Second World War as an ‘enemy alien’ – stuck for the duration in Douglas on the Isle of Man. There he created dream images straight out of the unbuilt projects of ...”

“... to meet the sages of the East. In Sri Lanka, the most influential of these spiritual tourists was Henry Steel Olcott, a former Union Army colonel and theosophist from New Jersey whose profile appears on Sri Lankan stamps and who is claimed as one of the ‘heroes of independence’. After the American Civil War, Olcott grew disgusted by what he saw as the ...”

“... Street, in the de Maistre studio-salon, I met other more or less important people, among them Henry Moore, Graham Sutherland, Francis Bacon, as well as Douglas Cooper … I got to know Francis when he designed some furniture for my Eccleston Street flat. I like to remember his beautiful pansy-shaped face, sometimes with too much lipstick on it … In ...”

“... dashing blond boy he had been. ‘Was that Cecil Beaton?’ ‘No idea. Never liked the fellow. Green shoes.’ ‘Smelled delicious.’ ‘What’s that?’ ‘A book. I borrowed it.’ ‘Dead, I suppose.’ ‘Who?’ ‘The Beaton fellow.’ ‘Oh yes. Everybody’s dead.’ ‘Good show, though.’ And he went off to bed glumly singing ‘Oh, what a ...”

“... loathed by the general, reporting from Islamabad and asserting that the US Embassy had given the green light to the coup because it regarded the chief justice as a nuisance and wrongly believed him to be ‘a Taliban sympathiser’. Certainly no US spokesperson or State Department adjunct in the Foreign Office criticised the dismissal of the eight Supreme ...”

“... Aldbourne was an unspoiled village with the usual accoutrements of church, five pubs, cottages, a green, a duck pond and a purling stream. It might be nice to think that the War Office picked these locations to provide the young recruits with fresh memories of the peaceful and bucolic country they’d be fighting for, but the nearby artillery ranges in both ...”

“... to forget. A rash of articles erupted, explaining how different they really were: Vietnam hot and green, Afghanistan cold and arid, the Taliban had no nearby sanctuary like China or North Vietnam, militant Islam lacks the patriotic strand in revolutionary Marxism, and so on. That Vietnam ended long ago does not explain these hasty disclaimers: World War ...”

“... critic, having assured Elena that anyone who finds her novel risqué is an idiot who hasn’t read Henry Miller, gets drunk and assaults her in a lift. Meanwhile, Elena’s university friends are too caught up in workers’ rights to take her novel seriously. As one classmate puts it, ‘You did everything possible, right? But this, objectively, is not the ...”