“... wrongs. The place was ours, and we went and took it back.’ In The Winter War, Patrick Bishop and John Witherow (who went with the Task Force for the Observer and the Times) conclude: The war had everything in its favour. It was neat and tidy. It had a simple motive and a simple response … No war is to be wished for, but if they have to be fought, this was ...”

“... In Arthur Schlesinger’s court history, A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House, which might without unfairness be called the founding breviary of the cult of JFK, there appears the following vignette. Schlesinger had been asked to carpenter a ‘White Paper’ justifying Washington’s destabilisation of Cuba, in which the high-flown rhetoric of the New Frontier might form a sort of scab over the fouler business of empire ...”

“... a Jewish supermarket millionaire from the far West, while the Nixon Administration brought to Washington a veritable mafia of get-rich-quick Floridians and Californians who, to put it mildly, were not overly weighed down by a public service ethic. Henry Cabot Lodge had given way to Bebe Rebozo. Watergate scattered this group in all directions (including ...”

“... the rambunctious Lambert lives were and are entertaining. The life of the patriarch, George Washington, father of the like-named painter and as short-lived as his successors (1832-73), is little documented: he was a Baltimore railway engineer who emigrated to St Petersburg to work there; he died from heart failure on a visit to London two months before ...”

“... of the brigade, division and task force.’A few weeks ago, at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington DC, the state finally got round to recognising the only physical hero of the story, a decent guy named Hugh Thompson who saw what was going on, landed his helicopter between Lieutenant Calley’s killing-squads and the remnant of the ...”

“... a rhinestone dog-collar.’ He was responding to Auden’s admonition on reading O’Hara’s and John Ashbery’s entries for the Yale Younger Poets Prize in 1955: ‘I think you (and John, too, for that matter) must watch what is always the great danger with any “surrealistic” style, namely of confusing authentic ...”

“... In June 2001, John Dower, a historian of Japan, wrote a comment piece in the New York Times about the blockbuster movie Pearl Harbor. The problem with it, he thought, was not its predictable romantic digressions or historical errors but its moral obtuseness. Like earlier films on the subject, it was ‘a paean to patriotic ardour and an imagined American innocence … sanitised to an attractive level of virtual violence ...”

“... that included her aunt, Sarah Siddons, her father, Charles, and her uncle, the great tragedian John Philip Kemble, Fanny herself was deeply ambivalent towards the theatre. She first aspired to be a writer rather than an actress; and it was only when the family faced bankruptcy that the latest Kemble was swiftly prepared for the stage. As the manager and ...”

“... of stabilising the atmosphere seems destined never to get going. A more sinister explanation for Washington’s resistance has to do with the centrality of military strategy in contemporary policy-making. Donald Rumsfeld and others like him have apparently calculated that climate change will enhance rather than detract from the country’s long-term ...”

“... for the diversity of opinion and freedom of information on which correct decision-making depends. John Stuart Mill’s Considerations on Representative Government is probably the most lucid defence of democracy in these terms. The difficulty here, however, is the widely accepted ignorance and fickleness of the masses. Cognitive defences of democracy tend to ...”

“... between the appearance of Thomas Pynchon’s first book and the Beatles’ second long-player, John Williams, a professor at the University of Denver, sent his agent in New York a draft of his latest novel, which detailed the unhappy marriage, undistinguished career and early death from cancer of an imagined professor at the University of Missouri a ...”

“... loss of her daughter – that fixed her reputation.I never met Didion or her husband, the novelist John Gregory Dunne, but in September 1974 I heard Didion speak one evening in the Branford College common room at Yale. Dunne was there as well, stepping in when her voice began to trail off. I was teaching a non-fiction seminar on Wednesday evenings that year ...”

“... at its usual rigmarole./ The gopher pining for a caramel’. (The gopher must be Jefferson; Washington himself had wooden teeth.) The rigmarole, the parallel lines and the idea of polygraphy all comment on Muldoon’s writing of history in ‘Madoc’. ‘Madoc’ may be enriched by reading it as or with a parallel text. Either a Dictionary of ...”

“... which he found feathering the ‘uncomfortable nest’ of another recluse, the Sydney painter John Passmore: ‘curb your magnanimity and be more of an artist.’ The ugly face of Holden’s Performance gets in the way of a more seductive writerly presence that now unfolds, years later, in Eucalyptus. This sweet-talking book sidesteps many hurdles by ...”

“... that had accompanied Rembrandt from his late twenties; or the wrinkles and pinched lips in the Washington portrait of 1659 to the painter’s recent bankruptcy and critical eclipse. Then, perhaps, the Zeuxis from Cologne of 1662 could take up the story – Rembrandt now defiantly posing as the painter whose unfashionable images of ugly humanity caused him ...”