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“... almost perfect lack of surface structure ensures that it strikes nothing that might end up in the white circulation of thought.’ On a long, fast ride, the run-of-the-mill cycling brain can turn the tiniest flaw into a grinding, unignorable obsession: ‘a pounding riff from a song, a bit of long division that starts over and over, a magnified anger at ...”

“... odd little book is eventually going to turn into a mock-judicial arraignment of the great lover. Richard Aldington (The Romance of Casanova) likewise adopts a God’s eye-view, makes Balbi a lay figure called Marco and invents a barmy alternative outcome whereby Casanova is recaptured and brainwashed. Sabatini, who as a gifted linguist could have worked ...”

“... bleating like eminent Victorians.’ ‘A man came down the street with the meth-pink eyes / of a white rat, his gait a mortal shuffle.’ Hofmann also has an ear for ironies that leave some sort of opening for kindness, and he has a tenderness for all defiances or survivals of neglect: The branch-line is under the axe, but it still runs, rattling and ...”

“... first of four volumes. He has used a far wider range of sources than was available to Professor Richard Ullman when he began his masterly three-volume account of the same events. The title of this first book is somewhat misleading, for the focus is British: no attempt has been made to use the French archives, which still await exploration. Moreover, and ...”

“... they were in France, they had to call in a nurse from the American Hospital in Paris. She was a White Russian, Mongolian or ‘Chinky-looking’, and, Una thought, ‘quite unmistakably of our own class’. John, at 54, fell insanely in love with Evguenia Souline. She was restrained, but only for a short time, by the thought of the example of infidelity ...”

“... already had a couple of unsettling epiphanies this soccer year. Out of habit, I battled my way to White Hart Lane on the first day of the season, expecting to savour the ten-year-old’s sensations I’ve been savouring for thirty years: the verdant sward, the August sun, the eager, shirt-sleeved throng and, best of all, the certain knowledge that my ...”

“... was the long, emotion-charged speech with which, as Israeli Ambassador, he acutely embarrassed Richard Nixon, who ‘sat mute with his eyes averted’. When his term as Chief of Staff was up, Rabin asked for the Washington Embassy, to the acute surprise of those who found it difficult to visualise him as a diplomat and despite the pain it must have caused ...”

“... are concerned with everything from high diplomacy – Q: What do you say if you meet someone like Richard Nixon? A: ‘History will record your true worth’ – to how to patronise new neighbours. Q: ‘How can I be helpful without making them think my house is an extension of their house?’ A: Tell them where the best shops are. They want to know whether ...”

“... in 1764. Woodcut illustrations, scanty before the 19th century, can be found as early as 1681 in Richard Burton’s Historical Remarques. The great age of the London guidebook began, however, in the middle of the 19th century, as David Webb has shown in the London Journal (1980, No 2). One important development illustrates nicely that odd relationship ...”

“... Cold Warriors caught in a time-warp’. But heroic trade-unionism is at one with the ancients, the white carthorse on the steps of Number Ten is dust with Bellerophon, the horse of Alexander. A cruel memory of that age lingers, the TUC trip to Poland at the height of Party-military repression in that country. It was a jaunt which the EEPTU opposed ...”

“... in American Africans in Ghana (2006), visitors or residents included Maya Angelou, Malcolm X, Richard Wright, Martin Luther King, Adam Clayton Powell, George Padmore, C.L.R. James and more. Frantz Fanon wrote much of The Wretched of the Earth in Ghana, and the year before Ali’s visit, W.E.B. DuBois died and was buried in Accra. In February 1964 Cassius ...”

“... with fresh tree stumps. ‘We cut them down,’ a guard says. ‘There was a delegation wearing white suits. They didn’t want to get them dirty.’ When you have a country to rebuild maybe heritage is indulgence. Or maybe it’s something else. Beirut’s architects talk about ‘collective amnesia’: building over unpleasant history is the best way of ...”

“... guests had their heels checked for explosives – this was well before the ‘shoe bomber’ Richard Reid tried to bring down an American Airlines flight from Paris to Miami. The Chadian state used to be – in the words of the American anthropologist Janet Roitman – a ‘garrison-entrepôt’: a guarded storage facility for hoarders in one of the ...”

“... abbreviated quality of Down’s Syndrome … The red, uneven, shining skin had plastic patches of white fat [like] layers of overlapping Parma ham.’ The novel suffers from a surfeit of literary, as well as linguistic, self-consciousness. Characters are continually pelting each other with chunks of Shakespeare or T.S. Eliot. There are even a couple of ...”

“... object of Michael’s affections complains that he’s ‘too dogmatic’, too ‘black and white’), while the tragi-farcical ending collapses the different levels of reality in a surprising and effective way. In The House of Sleep, on the other hand, a kinky, right-wing mad scientist rubs shoulders with more plausible cast members for no particular ...”