“... lusts and local hatreds: Dear Katherine, David came and took me out of my bed last night and we went for a long walk in McGavin Park and he kissed me in the carpark but I didn’t let him go all the way, not like that Morag McGregor in 104 who does it with anyone. Dear Fiona, I wasn’t going to tell you this, but David borrowed some of my Toyah ...”

“... The world​ needs Seymour Hersh. Without his indefatigable reporting, we would know even less than we do about the crimes committed by the US national security state over the last fifty years. While most of his peers in the press have been faithfully transcribing what are effectively official lies, Hersh has repeatedly challenged them, revealing scandalous government conduct that would otherwise have been kept secret: the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, the domestic surveillance programme run by the intelligence agencies in the 1960s and 1970s, the torturing of prisoners at Abu Ghraib ...”

“... The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. ‘Five years, that’s all we’ve got,’ he sang on the album’s opening number. Nobody in 1972, least of all Bowie himself, could have predicted where he would be in five years’ time, let alone forty. Yet Bowie’s towering and contradictory status, as both the most derivative and ...”

“... a Fulbright scholarship; she meets Ted Hughes and marries him. Two roses, Frieda and Nicholas. If we could read it all simultaneously – journals, letters, stories, poems – a truer picture would emerge: of her doing and her desiring at the same time. It would create, as David Trinidad is quoted as saying in Peter Steinberg’s introduction, ‘a movie of ...”

“... with lower-case letters at the beginning of lines, might have been no more than what Stefan George, who employed such devices wholesale, was later to call barbed wire against the uninitiated (‘Stacheldraht wider Unberufene’). But the archaic language had the more destructively alienating effect of sounding poetic while concealing meaning ...”

“... I went up to Oxford, and featured a jolly song supposedly counselling against nostalgia called ‘We Said We’d Never Look Back’, any three bars of which bring back memories of what I most disliked about those times. Now it is back in the West End, and its revival coincides with the publication of Sebastian Faulks’s ...”

“... Trump in the ‘cockpit of American power’ will reveal ‘just how terrifyingly normal a nation we are, with our populist jingoism and hawkish foreign policy’. The bipartisan support for the president’s bombing campaigns shows that little has changed in this respect, however. As Trump ordered strikes on Syria in April last year, Fareed Zakaria hailed ...”

“... synthesis of James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom (1988) – whose title alone suggested that we were back on familiar terrain – and in the sepia-tinted sentimentality of Ken Burns’s documentary. In McPherson’s influential work, a fixation on racial rather than class relations ensured that there would be no more discomfiting questions about the ...”

“... to escape the amorous god of poetry, Apollo. The laurel referred to is the sweet-scented variety we know as the bay tree, hence the joke in one of Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks: ‘Why was Petrarch so madly in love with Laura? Because it tastes so good with sausage and thrush.’ Another wordplay is on l’aura, meaning ‘breeze’ or ‘breath’ and ...”

“... Peter Halket, Schreiner’s fictional trooper, witnesses the hangings. He has raped women in the bush and machine-gunned villages, toppling rows of ‘black men’s heads’ like ‘the corn in sheaves’. When confronted at the campfire by a vision of Jesus, he hides behind his boss. ‘With Cecil it’s all right; you can do what you like … provided that ...”

“... option for restless spirits: a motive that can be traced back to early Victorian times, when George Borrow’s fascination with Spanish or Gypsy low life was bred of detestation for native ‘gentility’. On the other hand, Britain’s Imperial primacy – whose memory long outlasted its reality – inevitably encouraged dreams of daring exploits in ...”

“... novels, one tale for each decade; Sallis backtracks, flashes forward, feels free to doctor what we think we know. The past is up for permanent revision. Old scabs are picked at until they bleed afresh. Sallis outlined his temporal scheme when he explained to me how the original Lew Griffin novel, The Long Legged ...”

“... belief’. This hardly seems up to the job: if that’s all the word means, the wonder is that we have waited so long for it. When has our understanding of public life not been shaped more by emotion than by ‘objective facts’? When was this golden age of objectivity? Surely not in the time when press lords such as Northcliffe and Beaverbrook liked to ...”

“... things. Have you read The Rise of the Colored Empires by this man Goddard? … The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be – will be utterly submerged.’ ‘Tom’s getting very profound,’ his wife Daisy remarks. Buchanan carries on: ‘This fellow has worked out the whole thing. It’s up to us, who are the dominant race, to watch out ...”

“... Growing up​ in Liverpool we knew about mass violence. The Blitz had left bombsites that were thickest around the docks. The cenotaph in front of St George’s Hall told us what had happened to the men who enlisted there. Surrounded by Murphys and Rooneys you could hardly forget the Great Famine that pushed waves of Irish immigrants into Liverpool cellars and court housing ...”