“... they look so hard.’ Throughout this very varied book, and especially when writing on art, John Berger invites us to acknowledge the absolutes and universals which, he insists, lie behind the surfaces of things. He doesn’t have a great deal to say about those absolutes, and asks us to be content with terms like the essential, the invisible, the ...”

“... signing with Epic, a division of CBS that was basking in the record-breaking success of Michael Jackson’s Thriller. The band was rewarded with a bigger budget and full creative control: ‘I was supremely confident I was writing pop classics,’ Michael later said. Ridgeley didn’t do much more than look good while pretending to play guitar, but he ...”

“... to metropolitan notice through a sensational murder case involving two of his maternal uncles: Sir John Dineley-Goodere, who was the victim; and his younger brother Captain Samuel Goodere (after whom Foote was named), who was executed for the murder. The back story was a saga of legal wrangling over some hugely valuable estates so wrapped around with ...”

“... Germany and at first didn’t hesitate to express his impatience with the scare: when asked by Sir John Barlow, MP for Frome, whether he was aware that there were 66,000 German soldiers in England and 50,000 stands of Mauser rifles stored in cellars within a few hundred yards of Charing Cross, he thanked Barlow for providing such an excellent example of the ...”

“... also provoke a degree of puzzlement, as much on the right as on the left. In The Right Nation, John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, two centre-right journalists who work on the Economist, ask why only 54 per cent of voters earning over $100,000 a year voted for Bush in 2000. Why does the party of big business, deregulation and tax-cutting engender less ...”

“... but to have a ‘friend’ – no, it really won’t do. ‘I’m your friend,’ said Myfanwy to John as they crouched in the ‘dark and furry cupboard while the rest played hide-and-seek’. Betjeman got that about right.‘We’ve always been the greatest friends’ – that is the kind of thing the lady says about her dentist or accountant, or a woman ...”

“... father and mother. He believes that he is the illegitimate son of Queen Victoria by her servant John Brown, who must have ‘lifted his kilt’ on some unrecorded occasion. Everywhere, on tea-caddies and biscuit-tins, he looks proudly at images of his mother’s face. Samuel believes it, but we don’t, any more than we believe Pip’s great expectations ...”

“... came, Rogin believes, in 1981. ‘To confirm the President’s faith in the power of film, John Hinckley, imitating the plot of the movie Taxi Driver, deliberately shot the President on the day of the Academy Awards.’ It so fell out that Reagan had already recorded a breezy, upbeat salute to the audience at the Oscar ceremony: ‘the television ...”

“... book about it. With trained military skill they camouflage their identity on the dust-jacket: Bill Jackson and Dwin Bramall they call themselves, for all the world as if they were just reporters on the Sunday Times. Then on the title-page they unmask their batteries, and we find that we are actually in the hands of General Sir William ...”

“... are not Russian transplants, but Californians seen in their native habitat. We begin and end with John, an upwardly-mobile computer scientist whose work is connected (just how is never made clear) with nuclear weapons manufacture. At the age of 26, John belatedly realises that he is a workaholic with no private ...”

“... not so overwhelming as to stop him going on with his work as a Classical scholar. His friend Moses Jackson, with whom he had shared a flat for some time, but who apparently did not suffer from a reciprocal emotional arrest, went off to India, and married. Housman became Professor of Latin at London University, and later ended his career at Cambridge, amidst ...”

“... of the frontal and the recessive’ in these works, which he compares to the paintings of Jackson Pollock. He refers to the sense of being caught between diving into the image, drawn into the perspectival vortex, or remaining on the surface of the canvas, seeing it as a physical object rather than an imaginary space. For perspectival recession read ...”

“... John Lewis​ was at the heart of the protests in the early 1960s which transformed race relations in the United States. He participated in the sit-ins of 1960 in which black students (and a few white allies) occupied seats in shops, restaurants and entertainment venues from which African Americans were barred. In 1961 he joined the freedom rides, in which black and white activists travelled together on buses in the South to test whether local officials would follow new national rules prohibiting states from separating passengers on the basis of race ...”

“... Jesse James has stressed his Confederate roots and his support among ex-Confederates in Clay and Jackson Counties in Missouri. Stiles, however, distils James and the James Gang down until nothing is left of them but their secessionist convictions. Other reasons for their actions are ignored, marginalised or explained away. In Stiles’s hands, James is a ...”

“... When Lord Halifax was sent off as ambassador to the US, bogus baggage was placed on the Port Jackson at Liverpool to fool the Germans, and when it turned out that the Port Jackson wasn’t going to America, the baggage was transferred to the Warwick Castle. Meanwhile, Churchill plus a whole crowd of journalists and ...”