“... an enviable joie de vivre. When my husband and I first moved to the University of California at Davis in the early Sixties, we were dazzled to find that our colleagues owned stock in the Napa Valley vineyards, and drove out on the weekends to look at their grapes. In the ascetic East at the time, a penchant for anything more lowbrow than The Seventh Seal ...”

“... show off the scars of major surgery. The towpath was his lifeline as he upped his daily quota of miles, returning to health and strength and Pickett’s Lock. Within the fugitive stretches of the Lea Valley, from which the travellers who used to dive for scrap metal have been expelled, along with a number of camps of economic migrants and rough sleepers, our ...”

“... artists don’t have the opposite tendency. Some, like the contemporary San Francisco artist Jimmy Miles, incline to a dry, coolly minimalist practice, in which white space is not only tolerated, but an essential, if seriously off-kilter aesthetic feature in its own right: I’m not sure what to call Miles’s austere and ...”

“... a tall façade and an anonymous rear. The Sydney site, a peninsula overlooked on all sides across miles of blue water, or by a nearby high-rise city, ruled out this camouflage. All but one of the contestants began with the most obvious difficulty: how to squeeze two opera houses onto a site barely 250 feet wide by 350 feet deep, with deep water on three ...”

“... turn’ in an essay published in Social History in 1992, a tempest ensued. Jon Lawrence and Miles Taylor, two of Stedman Jones’s recent PhD students, insisted that Mayfield and Thorne had entirely misunderstood their mentor’s work, which they felt should be judged not in terms of its theoretical affiliations but according to an empiricist ...”

“... Martin trace the origins, rise and decline of a mostly misunderstood political movement. Angela Davis, who was an ally of the Panthers and a member of the Communist Party, complains that she is better remembered as a 1970s fashion icon, known for her large Afro, than for the depth of her political commitment: It is both humiliating and humbling to discover ...”

“... music and journalism in which Shaw moved. Weintraub is not as immaculate an editor as Rupert Hart-Davis, nor his match as a stylist (in one footnote he refers to Shaw’s ‘massive disinterest in Scottish music’), but he comes close to rivalling Hart-Davis’s superb annotation of Oscar Wilde’s letters, tracking down ...”

“... being top dogs, and top dogs they were until the battle of Ain Jalut (the Spring of Goliath) a few miles north of Jerusalem, in 1260. Keegan gives a lot of attention to this battle, which not many people have heard of, not even Sir John Creasy, author of Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World. Hulagu, grandson of Genghiz, who ruled the southern half of a ...”

“... extreme length of Castro’s speeches is a puzzle. He compulsively worked them over. Angela Davis remembers him telling her that he used to get nervous before delivering them. Part of it may have been to do with the methodical patience he learned during his two years in the mountain fastness of the Sierra Maestra. It was also the place where Castro, who ...”

“... that might mean – or by tearing down statues of Robert E. Lee across the South. The 2400 miles of Route 66, America’s most famous highway, pass through only one state in the former Confederacy, Texas. Yet in 1936 the first edition of the Negro Motorist Green Book identified half of the 89 counties along the route as ‘sundown towns’, where ...”

“... by a Thai Communist hit squad in Bangkok later that year. How much​ did the British know? John Davis, the Force 136 man who was closest to Chin Peng, Lai Tek’s successor as MCP leader, had been in the prewar Special Branch. He knew the secret of Mr Wright, but did not tell his comrade. Anyway, the end of the war brought a new situation. In Indochina and ...”

“... might come up with. It would also have to be able to bomb targets on the ground five hundred miles away from base – an impressive range, for a fighter – and operate from the deck of a heaving warship at night and, if push really came to shove, hover and land like a helicopter. The last mass-produced fighter jet that did that, the British-designed ...”

“... his enterprises wins out over hard feelings. ‘Every day was an excitement,’ the animator Marc Davis is quoted as saying in both biographies. ‘Whatever we were doing had never been done before. It was such a great thrill to go in there . . . Everybody here was studying constantly . . . It wasn’t that you had to do these things – you wanted to do ...”

“... the crystal wine glasses, the Chateaubriand being carved in front of us at five hundred miles an hour felt extraordinary, a swank unreality that matched my elevated mood. I was 32. I was going to Hollywood. I was making a movie. I was going to be a screenwriter.I thought about Dad up there among the clouds and hoped he was looking down. He could ...”

“... Ronald Sukenick and Paul West, as well as their heirs, such as T. Coraghessan Boyle, Lydia Davis, Rick Moody, William Vollmann and David Foster Wallace. None of these writers – however popular or influential, however frequently their writing appeared in the Paris Review or Conjunctions or the year-end Best American and Pushcart anthologies ...”