“... not a recluse, for all the supposed quaintness of her incarceration in 1 Avondale Road, Palmers Green, ‘run’ by the lion aunt. She was also a copious letter and postcard-writer, a keeper-in-touch. At the same time, in both Barbera/McBrien and Spalding, it’s noticeable how many of her correspondents were publishers and literary editors (that ...”

“... Mark Honigsbaum is fascinated by fever trees. The phrase may bring to mind ‘the great, grey-green, greasy Limpopo River, all set about with fever trees’. But Honigsbaum is not interested in Kipling’s trees, or in the beautiful flat-topped acacias of the Kenyan rift valley, which are called ‘fever trees’ because they grow in malarial districts ...”

“... to evocations of Agincourt and Blenheim; and volunteering became so popular that, according to J.E. Cookson, more than one in five of the male population of military age went into armed service. Such a sudden burst of martial fervour can only be described as a revanche, equivalent to those in France (1792-93), Prussia (1806-7), and Russia (1812) – a ...”

“... Raban will go off and make one. He sails his boat into the Delta, looking for the line dividing green and blue water that marks the end of the river and the start of the trackless sea. Before he finds it, he is almost knifed by a crazed drug-addict who mistakes him for a federal agent, and he lands in an outlaw city where people do nothing but ‘Fight. Get ...”

“... was characteristically scathing about the morals of the British officers, ‘whose ideal is the green room of the Gaiety [Theatre]’, and who, in pursuit of promotion at home, thought nothing of butchering men who were fighting to defend a ‘thousand years of freedom’. If the soldiers seemed lacking in imagination, the journalists who accompanied the ...”

“... made. He slept with starlets – and then, in 1953, he married one. Patricia Neal, co-star with Ronald Reagan in The Hasty Heart and former lover of Gary Cooper, was infinitely glamorous and their marriage was more or less instantly unhappy, since Neal wanted to be a movie star and Dahl wanted to be more than a movie star’s husband. Moreover, he wanted ...”

“... He is sure that by vocation the poet knows, is susceptible to the ‘hit’, will accept what Ronald Schuchard calls in Eliot’s Dark Angel the ‘close connection in Eliot’s poetry between the rare moments of ecstasy and the recurring moments of horror’. Eliot identifies the presence of the latter in Charles Williams’s novel All Hallows’ Eve, in ...”

“... 1981 Mrs Thatcher made an ecstatic pilgrimage to Washington to commune with the new President, Ronald Reagan, about such then modish topics as supply-side economics and the evil empire. Hugo Young recalls the ‘patronising astonishment’ with which her Foreign Secretary, Lord Carrington, witnessed this effusive display. Asked by a colleague, on his ...”

“... readers who did not want it to end. Soldier of Fortune was founded by Robert K. Brown, a former Green Beret based in Boulder, Colorado, who made the profitable discovery that his publication could double as an employment agency for mercenaries and a weaponry catalogue. The magazine’s classified ads offered an eclectic menu of ‘professional ...”

“... The kind of good most persistently sought for children through books has been moral good, as J.S. Bratton demonstrates in her/his admirably interesting survey, The Impact of Victorian Children’s Fiction. Over the hundred and fifty years or so from Bratton’s beginnings to now, perhaps the most constant and one of the most attractive aspects of this ...”

“... hill, past sparse clusters of trees and houses coloured with a variety of wood stains – yellow, green and red. The fjord is overcast, and the mountains rise bleakly above. I pass a series of dirty houses, their windows blank. Tromsø’s centre consists of a main street – dotted with wooden houses and dull concrete high-rise hotels – some arterial roads ...”

“... of destabilising Afghanistan, Brzezinski hoped to turn it into Russia’s Vietnam. Under Ronald Reagan, the RDJTF matured into United States Central Command. Reagan increased the flow of weapons and support to the mujahedin, whom he hailed as ‘freedom fighters’ and compared to the Founding Fathers. He also experimented with recruiting other ...”

“... listeners falling downstairs and jumping out of windows in an effort to escape the little green men. The newspapers jumped on the bandwagon, calling for more government regulation of radio, much as they do now for television. When the Mercury Theatre’s Danton’s Death opened to mixed reviews the following week, they were quick to pounce. ‘For the ...”

“... on the blacklist. The virus that would surface decades later, disguised as Richard Nixon or Ronald Reagan, began here. Fault lines in the American psyche are most obvious at the interface of showbiz saccharine and the political process: Monroe’s birthday tribute to JFK, Sinatra as MC at the Kennedy White House, late-liberal millionaires from ...”

“... advertisement for liberalism. Headed ‘A Reaffirmation of Principle’, it openly rebuked Ronald Reagan for deriding ‘the dreaded L-word’ and treating ‘liberals’ and ‘liberalism’ as terms of opprobrium. Liberal principles, the text affirmed, are ‘timeless. Extremists of the right and of the left have long attacked liberalism as their ...”