“... is the 16th book about Laurence Olivier, and his foreword tells of two more biographers, John Cottrell and Garry O’Connor, too intent on their own deadlines to discuss their common quarry with him. All this activity may puzzle the lay person. Holden’s final pages report Olivier alive, as well as can be expected at 81, residing tranquilly in the ...”

“... on the wall, plates on the desk next to the typewriter bearing the remnants of disgusting meals (rice and tinned fish, rice and golden syrup). Halliwell rages, his ash blond wig sliding out of position, at an Orton who ignores him. Sirens can be heard, coming closer. Then comes a curious sentence: the spatiotemporal ...”

“... Similarly, when the president of the Israel Policy Forum, Seymour Reich, advised Condoleezza Rice in November 2005 to ask Israel to reopen a critical border crossing in the Gaza Strip, his action was denounced as ‘irresponsible’: ‘There is,’ his critics said, ‘absolutely no room in the Jewish mainstream for actively canvassing against the ...”

“... there with grander landscape sweeps in Canada, Alaska, California. He spoke of his love of John Clare, of ‘The Badger’ being one of his marker poems. Driving down to work at UC Davis, Snyder had noticed another kind of urban edgeland. ‘There is a big rice field, flooded paddy, near Sacramento airport. It used ...”

“... military establishment and the new government in Washington, a town presided over by another John/Jack the lad. Profumo’s go-getting reputation and unstuffy demeanour made him attractive to the men around JFK, who liked that he didn’t seem like a typical Brit, never mind a typical Tory. He was extremely sociable, and well suited to the work ...”

“... put behind the governor’s party – 2016 should have been a shoo-in for a Mitt Romney or a John McCain, especially against such an unpopular candidate as Hillary Clinton. A second point: when Lyndon Johnson passed the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act in 1965 he said with regret that the Democrats would lose the South for a ...”

“... bread; coffee. Dinner Steamed frankfurters; Lyonnaise potatoes; succotash; lettuce salad; rice custard pudding; coffee. It’s not Chez Panisse, but it’s better than porridge. The fact that Cole and Roe’s bodies were never found is suggestive: in the history of the Golden Gate Bridge (where the currents are more severe), the bodies of most ...”

“... postwar England. The manuscript had been rejected by several more literal-minded publishers before John Lehmann, the editor of New Writing, took it on at the recommendation of his assistant, Julia Strachey, Lytton Strachey’s niece. So it was as a literary work, with a lingering glow of Bloomsbury behind it, that David’s first book made its appearance. To ...”

“... well as the National Security Strategy of September 2002, largely written by Condoleezza Rice); and a few celebrated statements about the duties and limitations of democracy by John Quincy Adams, Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy. Adams’s 1821 Independence Day address to the ...”

“... can do well among the political elites in this country: ask Colin Powell or Condoleezza Rice. But in any case Hillary Clinton is unlikely to stumble: she’s an alarmingly disciplined candidate. Barack Obama first came to national attention when he gave the keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention in Boston. He was a state senator at the ...”

“... fields stretching to the horizon, with nobody to be seen except a few Hakka peasants tending their rice. Now you go to the same spot and look out at the 12-million-person megalopolis of Shenzhen.All this, however, isn’t what breaks my brain. The thing that breaks my brain is that combined with all this irrefutable evidence of change, the place still smells ...”

“... to be looking for them, is that Stuart was looked after by a man who used to be part of my family: John Brock, who ran a drop-in centre in Cambridge as part of the Wintercomfort homeless charity. Stuart was one of the people who campaigned for John’s release after he was imprisoned, along with Wintercomfort’s ...”

“... into terrible atrocities. My Lai happened because officers failed.’ Another Marine, Captain John McNamara, wrote home in 1967 that he was appalled by the loose talk he heard among his fellow officers about the need to employ terrorist tactics against terrorists: ‘Just a few years ago it was confined to the fringe. If the actual [US ...”

“... is primarily a storyteller, and has never been shy of letting us know it. In The New Confessions John James Todd speaks confidentially to the reader: ‘Anyway, I digress. Let me tell you something about this enterprise upon which we have both – you and I – embarked. Here is the story of a life. My life ... If on occasion I have used some innocent ...”

“... put it: ‘We’ve given all you people need to know.’ Even Republicans don’t like Mitt. (John McCain thought the inimitable Sarah Palin a better choice as his running mate.) At the convention, it was astonishing how many speakers barely mentioned the presidential candidate at all. In the end, there was almost nothing for a good Republican to say. His ...”