“... of Russians, Indians, Irishmen, suffragettes, anarchists and troublemakers of all kinds. He rode a white charger at the head of suffrage marches, and carried himself with such distinction that he was called the Grand Duke. To top it all, when I read his diary I discovered he was passionately and very problematically in love with his best friend’s wife. I ...”

“... But the healing aspect was still just as prominent: Alice James, neglected sister of Henry and William, found temporary relief through hypnosis during her terminal cancer. She viewed it quite differently from du Maurier’s character: hypnosis, she dictated to her diary, seemed to have opened up ‘a vast field of therapeutic possibilities’ – though ...”

“... for postage stamps. Here, again, impeccably jacketed in black with red swastika’d armband on white ground, is Albert Speer’s Inside the Third Reich: The Definitive Account of Nazi Germany by Hitler’s Armaments Minister. After a few minutes spent considering this Berlin Wall of travellers’ dulce et utile, one would hardly be surprised to find a ...”

“... towers of a city in the distance; then a set of ramshackle houses; a pasture and a farmhouse; the white screen of a drive-in; a field full of oil pumps. A drawling voice, all wide vowels and unclosed consonants, starts to philosophise: ‘The world is full of complainers, and the fact is, nothing comes with a guarantee ... Something can always go wrong ...”

“... ambitions high. In one of his final letters from detention, he assured his friend, the novelist William Boyd: There’s no doubt that my idea will succeed in time, but I’ll have to bear the pain of the moment ... the most important thing for me is that I’ve used my talents as a writer to enable the Ogoni people to confront their tormentors. I was not ...”

“... Bible that showed angels going up and down a stairway to heaven, and I can still see their white robes as if they’d just been done with Persil in a boil wash. One of those long summer days, my friend David and I got caught after stealing powdered floor cleaner from the local supermarket and pouring a huge mound of it in a doorway. The manager went in ...”

“... the seas and come … to B … a small town fastened to a field in Indiana,’ the late, great William Gass began his imperishable short story ‘In the Heart of the Heart of the Country’, from 1968. Or, with his and your permission, ‘I have sailed the seas and come … to G … a healthcare mecca and football burg that was previously a town with a ...”

“... waiting for him. And it was still hot. Barack Obama read this to an audience of children on the White House lawn last Easter. Make of that what you will. Though I’ve yet to put it to the test, I’m with Montaigne in finding myself less than horrified at the idea of being eaten, provided I’m dead at the time; and eating someone else (also supposing them ...”

“... he would otherwise have been denied. Did Wedgwood’s childhood illness fire his ambition? William Gladstone thought it was the making of him, turning his mind ‘inward’. Other early biographers insisted that his success was due to innate genius, rather than an accident of birth or circumstance. Tristram Hunt steers clear of hagiography, arguing ...”

“... War”’.Kowol takes issue with that claim. He begins not with a politician but with John Baker White, a reserve officer in the London Rifle Brigade before the war and then a serving officer. Baker White kept a journal, a curious but fascinating document which was published in 1942 as A Soldier Dares to Think. He was ...”

“... he was abruptly assaulted by the infernal din of the tripe-processing; dozens of men with red and white faces, dressed in black and white, called to each other as they chopped up sinews and severed tendons, sculpted entrails while proffering numbers over their counters as they displayed bowls of livers, sacks of hearts for ...”

“... Whitman (‘the revolt of the Bohemian temperament, with its poetry of crude naturalism’), and William James (‘an impassioned empiricism ... declaring the universe to be wild and young’). The Californian ‘humorists’ referred to by Santayana were the product, primarily, of a distinct historical phenomenon – the mining towns which sprang up during ...”

“... to scaling the highest mountains, collecting the most species, and above all to standing where no (white) man had ever stood before, finding organisms hitherto ‘unknown to science’ or hacking his way through trackless jungle. Such a burning ambition to achieve glory, especially by testing himself physically to the limit, is not obvious from Wilson’s ...”

“... from its war against Vietnam. The Middle East file fell by default to the then secretary of state, William Rogers, a conventional WASP public servant, Second World War veteran, lawyer and former attorney general. To the annoyance of Kissinger, who loathed him, Rogers took the job seriously. The Rogers Plan of December 1969 delivered a ceasefire in the costly ...”

“... the average Hollywood day. Here he is describing one of his boss’s difficulties: Mia had a big white cat named Malcolm that she adored. She was always talking sign language to the cat, who was deaf. Mia’s obsession with Malcolm was bad enough, but the sign language really got on Frank’s nerves. He didn’t mind cats in general, but he came to despise ...”