“... others have covered it adequately, but he is not short of material, having had access to the John Fitzgerald Kennedy Library (where Hadley’s letters, alas without Ernest’s thousandfold replies, are stored) and many other major collections; indeed all the biographers appear to have been received with unusual generosity by the Hemingway family and the ...”

“... by the end of it the mystery has been cleared up, The Assault has been spoken of by some – by John Gross, for example – as, on one level, like a detective novel. The resemblance, however, is weak. Anton Steenwijk does not seek out explanations for what happened on that terrible January night in 1945, they seek him out, unbidden and, consciously at ...”

“... A hoodlum’s job done by honest men. With us, you only kill for reasons of state.’ This is the opinion of Maurice Robert, research director of the French secret service (and later Ambassador to Gabon), as recorded by Faligot and Krop in their excellent and well-researched book. It is difficult to accept such a verdict on the DGSE (originally the BCRA, then the DGER, then the SDECE ...”

“... because Kissinger had effectively brought the opinions of the South African Prime Minister, John Vorster, to bear on the issue (Meredith is particularly good at describing this), and because of sanctions. Economic sanctions against Rhodesia were in the end, and in their way, a success. They did not achieve what had been initially hoped for them, because ...”

“... A Quaker delegation visited Nicholas I at St Petersburg in an attempt to prevent the Crimean War. John Bright opposed that war in his greatest speeches, but he was clearly not a pacifist: he supported the armed suppression of the Indian Mutiny and applauded the Union victory in the American Civil War. With Great Britain not involved in a European war for ...”

“... atrocity to atrocity, in one of their series of imaginary conversations, the Noctes Ambrosianae. John Wilson (‘Christopher North’) appears to have been responsible for the horribly inflammatory discussion of the subject there, and to have scripted the contributions assigned to the Ettrick Shepherd, James Hogg. One scholar has asserted that the imaginary ...”

“... he was happy and fruitful in Manchester and felt especially loyal to the Vice-Chancellor, Sir John Stopford (who, I add from personal knowledge, was also one of the nicest men known to science). Although as a school of organic chemistry Cambridge was at that time ‘virtually nonexistent’, it had possibilities, and after securing some administrative ...”

“... of total immersion as practised by the Baptists, according to their conception of the methods of John the Baptist. She could not join without that, and the river, of course, was frozen over. She would have to wait until the ice went out. She does, but the immersion kills her. ‘The Baptism’ is an uncharacteristically bitter story, a settling of scores ...”

“... author’s list of hostile quotations extends from St Paul, of course, to, rather surprisingly, John Paul II, with a side swipe at the father figures of Marxism. It is, he claims, only after a reformist group, whether based on church or on state, has been defeated by the resistance of the family and its resolute, ‘selfish’ adherence to its own values ...”

“... of Sherlock Holmes’s dog not barking. He examines in mordant detail one grandiose exception, John Wayne’s Green Berets, a glorification of those heroes with the aging director himself as colonel, which made large profits and aroused loud student protest. Its dishonesty, at a date when so much evidence about the true nature of the war had ...”

“... often convincingly, to Shaw’s need to wish away the intrusion into Shaw’s infancy of George John Vandaleur Lee – or, rather, the intrusion of the suspicion that Lee had been the lover of Shaw’s mother and was, perhaps, Shaw’s real father. In the teacher-pupil (or sculptor-statue) relation of Higgins to Eliza Doolittle, Mr Silver persuasively sees ...”

“... before the later work comes to seem as much about history as histrionics. When his publisher John Murray tried to clean up Don Juan in the interests of religion and propriety, Byron roared from Italy: ‘You sha’n’t make Canticles of my Cantos.’ But it was not just religious scruples at work: it was a growing cult of the dignity of Art. Byron ...”

“... was guaranteed to increase its underground following. It was Ginsberg’s old Columbia colleagues, John Hollander, Norman Podhoretz and Louis Simpson, all cutting their teeth in the New York literary scene under the approving auspices of Lionel and Diana Trilling, who led the charge against the Beats. ‘It is only fair to Allen Ginsberg to remark on the utter ...”

“... fallacy. ‘We bombed the North Vietnamese into accepting our concessions,’ drily remarked John Negroponte, a rough-stuff artist if ever there was one and a veteran of Cambodia and later of Honduras. (Mr Negroponte was to offer his resignation from Kissinger’s team a few years later over the Cyprus crisis. I once asked a close relative of his what ...”

“... As Songs of the Doomed so spectacularly illustrates, Doc’s the first American writer since John Dos Passos to tap the eroding and elemental fury within the American Dream and make the compost picture of American society in the last quarter of the 20th century work so elegantly on paper. I discovered two curious things about Doc’s writing when I was ...”