“... matter if an employee was Caucasian, just as it didn’t matter if an employee had a nose ring or green hair or was homosexual.’ If you could keep up with the pace, and didn’t fear the scrutiny of Enron’s Performance Review Committees (which ranked every employee on a scale from 1 to 5, with repeated 5s meaning dismissal), Enron’s Houston skyscraper ...”

“... on the front page of the Los Angeles Times of 30 September 1969 entitled ‘Murder Charges against Green Berets Dropped by Army’. From it Ellsberg learned that the Secretary of the Army, Stanley Resor, had ordered the military commander in Vietnam, General Creighton Abrams, to suspend the courts martial of Colonel Robert Rheault, commander of all Special ...”

“... on which they built a thirteen-room house called the Dell, where Austin, Mabel and her husband, David, established what seems to have been a largely harmonious ménage à trois. Mabel, much to her chagrin, never managed to meet the elusive poet face to face, although she claimed Dickinson enjoyed hearing her play the piano, and received from her a number of ...”

“... tells a story about a cocky colonel’s comeuppance on the links:The colonel is wearing shocking green ‘Scotch Tweed’.He will be victorious.His ‘caddie’ follows him carrying his ‘bags’.The clouds are amazed.The ‘holes’ are all a-tremble: the colonel is here!And now he is playing his shot:His ‘club’ flies into pieces!At ‘He will be ...”

“... bloodless abstraction – ‘All theory is grey, my friend,’ as Goethe observed, ‘but forever green is the tree of life.’ Carey sometimes takes this line: it lies behind his admiration for Ted Hughes, for instance, whose poetry exposes ‘the fragility and misplaced pride of the human intellect’. But, as Stefan Collini has observed, what really gets ...”

“... much heart.Reitlinger devotes a substantial number of pages to Eichmann and concludes, in a phrase David Cesarani quotes, that Eichmann’s ‘career was that of a German civil servant, absorbed in his work and getting no glory for it’. Reitlinger didn’t fail to recognise his significance in the murder of millions of Jews but, like Arendt later on, he ...”

“... traces, like the whiff of cordite long after the gun has been fired. When I mention this to David Cornwell/John le Carré, he says: ‘I can still feel it in my nostrils now.’ Historians, like spooks, need a sensitive nose, Orwell’s ‘Sniff, sniff’ for the detection of ‘all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our ...”

“... my own views on the origins of honours examinations in late Georgian Oxford corroborated by V.H.H. Green in his chapter on ‘Reformers and Reform in the University’. A giant’s strength is wonderful, proclaims Miranda, but not if monstrously used. If, however, as Metternich said, you can do anything with bayonets except sit on them, then surely you can do ...”

“... but the head of their mission, Michael Cashman, agreed with the EU delegate in Kigali, David MacRae, not to go public about it – it might have raised uncomfortable questions. For his re-election in August 2010, Kagame approved a slight erosion of his Soviet-style popularity, allowing his vote to drop to 93 per cent. Rwanda’s burgeoning ...”

“... controls, withdrawal from the EEC and import controls. Much of this wasn’t new. The historian David Edgerton has described the AES as a ‘modernising, techno-nationalist, productionist, autarchic programme’ that was basically complementary to Harold Wilson’s ‘White Heat’ agenda. It was, however, profoundly out of step with the European Community ...”

“... to brainstorm ideas to save the club. Kempster was on holiday, so the owner and boss of Chestnut, David Newton, sat in for him. Newton – who was not a Bostonian, or a Boston United supporter – said later that he experienced a sentimental epiphany. ‘I sat there with a lump in my throat,’ Newton told the Boston Standard. ‘I spent the rest of the day ...”

“... to exploit this insight. Since childhood he’s been a fan of another chameleon and shape-shifter, David Bowie, who was raised, like the author, in Bromley. Similarly, Kureishi’s next novel The Black Album was named after a bootleg LP by Prince to whom the main character, Shahid, is devoted. Prince plunders freely from various musical genres, from rock or ...”

“... there when the porter came along the platform shouting the mysterious invocation ‘Lancaster Green Ayre’.11 March. R.’s Aunty Stella rings from Edinburgh. She was 90 last week and apologises that she hasn’t learned a new Shakespeare sonnet to mark her birthday. However she recites off by heart, and with no mistakes, ‘Shall I compare thee to a ...”

“... normal classic names: Simon, Mark, Peter, Andrew, Paul, Martin, Michael, Stephen, Richard, Robert, David. Girls’ names remained more modish: some Sarahs, Anns and Elizabeths and even some residual Marys, but also plenty of Janets, Jackies, Lisas and Debbies, who soared and plummeted through the bestseller lists in the space of a couple of decades, the ...”

“... writer looks back to Donne and forward to Defoe. There is a gulf between, say, Marvell’s ‘green’ poems and his political verses, and some of the first may be contemporary with the second. An artist may or must (like Hamlet) look back and forward, ‘before and after’, as Dryden himself does in ‘Mr Congreve’: ‘Well now, the promis’d hour is ...”