“... that painters would have anything left to say about the observable world. It was only while in John Grierson’s employment – collaborating with Auden, Humphrey Jennings and Britten – that Coldstream rediscovered a private, ‘regressive’ zest for painting, working out of hours on ‘a craze for doing heads and faces’. Whatever rationale could be ...”

“... eating. A number of summers ago my friend Eli and I had dinner at a trendy downtown pizza place (John F. Kennedy Jr was at the next table). After we’d finished, and I was halfway out the door, Eli called me back, in a strangely delighted tone of voice, to show me the dead, foot-long sewer rat (grey, oily belly distended, chest flattened, long yellow ...”

“... speak for the Australian electorate? The impasse proved too much for the governor-general, Sir John Kerr. Although his authority was constitutionally questionable, Kerr broke the stalemate by ousting Whitlam, dissolving both houses of parliament, and calling a new election. The shock waves from this (ab)use of the royal prerogative continue to reverberate ...”

“... he discusses ‘the (sad) necessity of iconoclasm in a revolutionary situation with my friend John Barrell’. They wonder what they would do ‘if we ever found ourselves part of a mob storming through the portico’. Now, decades later, he ‘finds himself’ in the Getty Museum – in the very institution that radical art historians in California’s ...”

“... also a question of how buoyant one can be in the face of such things. In an early interview with John Haffenden, Muldoon was asked: ‘Why do you think the notion of alternative lives is peculiarly fetching, philosophically attractive, to your imagination?’ He replied: ‘I think it’s central. One of the ways in which we are most ourselves is that we ...”

“... engineers – under the pressure of extraordinary circumstances are compelled to act like heroes. John le Carré once called him ‘the source on which we all draw’. Alan Furst has been drawing on him for nearly twenty years: ‘The first paragraph of Kingdom of Shadows is a direct citation of Eric Ambler,’ he told an interviewer when that novel came out ...”

“... of white crosses and an Indo-Muslim dome sit alongside a rice paddy. His distant predecessor St John Philby (father of Kim), who acted as political officer in Amara ninety years ago, still enjoys a local reputation. Another sheikh fondly remembers one ‘Mr Grimley’, who helped build a vital canal in the 1940s. ‘There are very high expectations here ...”

“... Afghanistan emerged as an independent kingdom in the 18th century, though its frontiers would change many times and it would always be more a confederation of tribes and lesser khanates than a centralised state. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, determined to halt Russia’s Inner Asian advance and ‘secure’ its own North Indian frontier, Britain fought three wars with the Afghans ...”

“... Alistair MacLeod is a Canadian of Scottish descent, and, like John McGahern who has written a foreword to his collected stories, an astute observer of a very specific local setting – Cape Breton, Nova Scotia; of its landscape and industry, its closed communities, quotidian tragedies and domestic disappointments ...”

“... Americans, is close to hero-worship, treats FDR’s endless deceptions and tricks with indulgence. John Steinbeck, whom FDR once persuaded to do some spying for him in Mexico, came to the conclusion that he liked mystery, subterfuge and indirect tactics for their own sake. But maybe, like many privileged people, he didn’t see why the world shouldn’t be ...”

“... the period. He reads, for instance, the story of Pocahontas, the daughter of Powhatan who married John Rolfe and moved to London, not as a story of an Indian who sought to become an Englishwoman but as a complicated narrative of negotiation. He portrays Kateri Tekakwitha – the so-called Lily of the Mohawks, now a candidate for canonisation by the Catholic ...”

“... the solvency of a bank; the risk systems see to this. The danger posed by a Nick Leeson or a John Rusnak (the Baltimore trader currently under investigation) is somewhat different: that of traders deliberately concealing or falsifying deals they have done, so preventing the bank from even registering the risks or the losses being incurred. Deal-checking ...”

“... among them. Only at the end of the 17th century, through the editorial endeavours of John Toland and other radical Whig publicists, did standing armies and the Major-Generals emerge as the great evil of Cromwellian Government. It is when we trace the historical reputation of the Major-Generals that broader implications for the study of early ...”

“... marriage was neither thoughtless nor completely self-effacing. Martha was a voracious reader of John Stuart Mill, Dickens and Cervantes, though her husband-to-be warned her against the rude bits unsuitable for a woman in Don Quixote. She was interested in music and painting, and had no shortage of suitors. When Freud became obsessively suspicious of her ...”

“... up by the text and promulgated; Michael is sometimes addressed by his brother as Mr Bones, like John Berryman’s alter ego in The Dream Songs (‘Oh how lovely, Mr Bones, how bloody lovely’). The German art teacher becomes the German Bachelor, and the Bauhaus, where he said he once worked, becomes the Bower House. Later in the book, Butcher will refer to ...”