“... are legendary, and often attributed to some character flaw, to paranoia or arrogance. Robert Dallek in Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power situates their deceitfulness within a broader transformation of diplomacy, where the line that separated foreign and domestic policy, always unclear, was practically erased. Dallek’s book is ...”

“... some time after Laurence Sterne’s death in 1768 that this passage was itself plagiarised from Robert Burton’s attack on literary imitators in his introduction to The Anatomy of Melancholy. ‘As apothecaries,’ Burton observed, ‘we make new mixtures every day, pour out of one vessel into another … Again, we weave the same web still, twist the same ...”

“... House, survives. Burlington House was sold off to the government in the 1850s and modified by Robert Smirke, with what Pevsner called ‘high Victorian cruelty’, to house the Royal Academy. Charles Barry Jr and Robert Banks added the ranges that enclose the courtyard and house the Linnean, Geological and Astronomical ...”

“... combined exercise in Dada, minor betrayal and the care and feeding of the dreaded Internal Revenue Service, which likes tidy records of incidental expense. ‘Bernard went and got lost, talking to Susan Dey at the bar. He’s a would-be star-fucker. Susan Dey was emotional about the play and said she was protesting war now. I don’t know which ...”

“... we can’t altogether accept the claims of his literary Muse, who allows him some felicities – Robert Flaherty was ‘like an Irish Bishop who had turned gangster’ – but more often lets him flounder (‘She was a neat chick’, of a Czech actress of the Thirties), we can at least salute the book’s utter transparency and lack of guile about both ...”

“... ranks, he had enlisted under the compulsion of hunger and unemployment. He had never forgiven the Service the fact of its feeding him.’ The woman Garland loves, Thea Mayven, comes from the Mearns and could plausibly be taken to be a precursor of Chris Guthrie. Like Gibbon, she has mixed feelings about her origins: ‘In Scotland, in the little farm where ...”

“... thought very funny at the time when Bernard Levin in the Spectator hung the Foreign Secretary’s service on the Hoylake Urban District Council round his neck. But Lloyd was no Pooterish aspirant, with absurd social pretensions, to the inner circle of Tory grandees. Knowing well enough that Macmillan referred to him as ‘a middle-class lawyer from ...”

“... require of each that he shall make the same effort; that is, we demand of him the best service it is in his power to give.’ What remains obscure is who ‘we’ are. Bellamy is an enthusiast for solidarity. Zamyatin in 1924 made ‘we’ the pronoun of repression. Bellamy doesn’t perceive that solidarity, like anything else, can be a ...”

“... choirboys and girls of the 1940s. Can Modern Baptists be true to life? We may hope so. Carl Robert Pickens is occasionally called Bobby, but more often Mr Pickens, in a Dickensian, Pickwickian way. He has many problems. He has just been sacked from his job as assistant manager at the Sonny Boy Bargain Store in Tula Springs – partly because of the ...”

“... his preposterous spider’s web of debt and counter-debt when the man who yearned to emulate him, Robert Maxwell, failed to achieve the same thing in a not dissimilar situation? Mr Shawcross records more than once that one of the few things capable of ruffling Murdoch’s cool temper was the suggestion that there was something in common between him and ...”

“... business, now called Atlas and to become eventually ‘the largest de-greasing and de-scaling service of its kind in the world’. His father’s secretary remembers that, at 18, Denis ‘was already the man he was to become’. Common sense, says Carol, has always been his most valuable asset, along with ‘pragmatism and homespun logic’. Two of his ...”

“... A twice-fired former sheriff and university security officer, he worked for AT&T’s security service. Like the other guards protecting Olympic Centennial Park, he was hired at the minimum wage. The bomb fragments found at his home, however, may only have been payment in kind, souvenirs of the explosion rather than evidence pointing to its perpetrator. In ...”

“... I heard a Portishead song being played in Spud-U-Like, and every weekend since 1988 motorway service stations on the M6 and M62 have been haunted by clubbers who spend the nights journeying between venues in Leeds, Manchester, Liverpool and the Midlands. Pop music has also stormed the citadel of literary fiction, and characters in novels such as Karline ...”

“... High’s Latinate period, which – though the school was an ancient foundation and claimed Robert Henryson, the ‘Scottish Chaucer’, among its early masters – occurred circa 1935. The headmaster, whom I encountered face to face only once, had MA Cantab after his name and wore a black cloak that, though every teacher had one, gave him an especially ...”

“... containing my will, birth certificate, marriage certificate, national insurance and health service numbers, share certificates relating to a small bankrupt publishing house (kept as a souvenir), an Equitable Life policy, a testimonial from F.R. Leavis dated 1946, and a letter from L.C. Knights regretting that he couldn’t act as a referee since my ...”