“... funeral took place before the report came in, and, as the ceremony was ending, a man called Robert Burns – Shirley Ann’s uncle – took out a Beretta and shot the reverend three times in the head. There was no insurance, but Radney was quick to see fresh opportunities. Burns had done what half the town dreamed of doing, and few people wanted to see ...”

“... the German Occupation was the one that had served in the 1914-18 war, while those who’d been too young to be mobilised then, but had experienced the wartime atmosphere without the adventure, now found compensation in the Resistance. This argument is much used by historians such as Henri Amouroux, who sees June 1940 as a time when the ...”

“... rhyme, can hope to convey both their individual voices and their collective charm. It is here that Robert Kehew’s anthology, Lark in the Morning, succeeds so brilliantly. Kehew’s bilingual edition includes 28 poets and 55 songs, extending from the ‘First Troubadour’, Guillem de Peiteus (1071-1127, but see the cautions above), to the last, Guiraut ...”

“... re-examined the evidence that has appeared since then and incorporated the important new material. Robert Conquest’s books – especially The Great Terror and Harvest of Sorrow, his work on the collectivisation of agriculture – did not receive the universal acclaim which came the way of Bullock’s Hitler. Even those who thought Hitler relatively ...”

“... Caron, the national archivist, who thought that by 1945 all had been said. Confronted with the young Richard Cobb, about to begin his Herculean labours, he advised some alternative field of study. ‘Monsieur,’ he said kindly, ‘vous êtes venus trop tard pour l’histoire de la Révolution Française.’ He was, of course, wrong. The post-war ...”

“... Celebrities who dropped by included Ginger Rogers, Moss Hart, Lynn Fontanne, Jack Dempsey, Robert ‘Believe-it-or-not’ Ripley, Elsa Maxwell and Jack Benny. They were in court less because of Hauptmann than because of Lindbergh, the biggest celebrity of them all. It is a sign of the passing of time that on the dustjacket of this book the name of ...”

“... from that visit,’ Kenner wrote after McLuhan died. Around the same time, Guy Davenport, a young Rhodes Scholar, was spending the summer tramping around France and Italy with a recently made friend, Christopher Middleton. They had only two books with them, a collection of Donne’s poems and Pound’s Cantos. ‘Neither of us, I think, had much notion ...”

“... have a large collection of Monets (say) than that Buffalo University should have a collection of Robert Graves manuscripts (say). I view with unconcern the drift of British manuscripts to America, where our language is spoken and our literature studied. So one must travel to California to read, for example, Amis’s several unpublished novels: the ...”

“... and trade publishers, he became a pre-eminent influence on all sorts of American writers: the young Allen Ginsberg paid him homage and copied his style, while Robert Lowell, for example, looked to Williams for a freer, more democratic manner than his rivals could offer. Though he remains an acquired taste in ...”

“... McCarthy and facing dissent in his party, he became convinced he wasn’t going to win. Then Robert F. Kennedy, one of three main Democratic contenders (alongside McCarthy and the vice president, Hubert Humphrey), was assassinated, only two months after the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. The former governor of Alabama George Wallace ran a ferocious ...”

“... motions but we’re no longer in control.’ I received this text message on 9 August 2009 from Robert Bourgi, known in Paris as ‘the attorney of la Françafrique’. It’s probably not the last word on France’s incestuous relationship with her former colonies in sub-Saharan Africa, but it put an end to my four-day wait at a rat-infested border ...”

“... justice department to investigate Cohen’s father-in-law. But the inquiry by the special counsel, Robert Mueller, has stayed on course, and on 25 January another close associate of Trump, Roger Stone, who professed to have advance knowledge of a WikiLeaks release of the DNC documents, was arrested in Fort Lauderdale. Stone is charged with seven ...”

“... other composers in the American maverick tradition, from Charles Ives, Cage and Morton Feldman to Robert Johnson, Jimi Hendrix and Sun Ra.The revolution that began at the Five Spot was part of the wider black freedom struggle, as well as an extension of an American philosophy of self-reliance and artistic emancipation that runs from Emerson to Whitman to ...”

“... tenderness and outrageous inventions. Hagiographical prefaces to his books by Allen Ginsberg and Robert Creeley align him with Hart Crane and Keats as a poet vulnerable to the world and prone to self-destruction. Wieners himself remembered taking the ferry to Provincetown with Frank O’Hara: ‘We stood again below deck by the hectic Atlantic cutting at our ...”

“... an American life as anything in Horatio Alger. Raised in grinding poverty, by the age of ten young Jack was up at three in the morning delivering newspapers to support his family. An autodidact, he mainly educated himself with books borrowed by the armful from Oakland Public Library. He left school at 14 to become a freebooting oyster pirate in the ...”