“... of the book and overlooked the subversive role of his ‘chief history researcher’, Kevin Baker, at the centre). Did the devil paint the picture, as Norman Mailer might have it, while God supplied the frame (or, since Mailer’s eschatology is not easy to decipher, was it the other way around)? Mailer, too, is having a love affair with America, but ...”

“... was born in June 1926 in the charity ward of Los Angeles General Hospital. Her mother Gladys Baker was now and again mad, leaving her daughter troubled but free to dream up an alternative life, and to develop her vital allure reading movie magazines. Norma Jeane had a keen sense of how to conquer people’s affections – especially those of men. She ...”

“... from Sinn Féin and the Chinese guerrillas who were fighting the Japanese. At SOE’s London HQ in Baker Street (known to cabbies as ‘the secret house’), businessmen and bankers with a gift for languages were recruited, as were foreign nationals living in Britain. F Section preferred French-speaking Mauritians to Frenchmen because, as British ...”

“... got the tourniquet on and a cigarette lit.’ After that came a bush-baby, and after that a ‘baker’s dozen of small, brilliant tropical birds’, but they all died in a fire. Nothing for it, there had to be another otter. So Maxwell acquired Edal. ‘When wet she would pull down a towel, or several towels, upon which to dry herself; when bored she ...”

“... turned to the new president, at which Thatcher tapped the side of her skull and said: ‘Peter, there’s nothing there.’ And after she had left office, Nicholas Henderson, her ambassador in Washington between 1979 and 1982, told Tony Benn: ‘If I reported to you what Mrs Thatcher really thought about President Reagan, it would damage ...”

“... gentleman who told Bathurst about his reluctant withdrawal from the pleasures of life was Sir Peter de la Billière, commander-in-chief of British forces during the first Gulf War, whose deafening began when he was still in his twenties (he was born in 1934). He was downgraded on the basis of his poor hearing at the age of 36, but appealed and was ...”

“... Zora Neale Hurston said. Gavin, an experienced biographer who has written books on Chet Baker, Lena Horne and Peggy Lee, as well as on ‘the golden age of New York cabaret’, should exercise greater care. (Incidentally, no context is given when he mentions Gary Glitter and Jonathan King, both of whom were later found guilty of sexually abusing ...”

“... truth, it seems both to Murdoch’s husband, John Bayley (‘Puss’), and to her biographer, Peter Conradi, that it did so here. In their view Murdoch’s advancing illness, crumbling away language and reason, laid bare in her an essential impulse toward love. As words broke up, it was the vocabulary of love and delight that survived the longest. When ...”

“... after forty years, but off the top of my head (current haircut modelled after the sleeve of Chet Baker & Crew, Pacific Records, 1956) wasn’t it ‘Existence precedes essence’? Or: ‘Man is condemned to be free’? Or (surely a contender for a TV quiz show clincher): ‘Hell is … other people!’? I fed the ‘famous dictum’ into Google and it was ...”

“... schools – and that was only ‘the tip of the iceberg’, according to the report’s author, Peter Clarke. Last summer, when he was still secretary of state for education, Michael Gove floated the idea of requiring schools to teach British values. In November, the DfE issued what it called ‘strengthened guidance’ on ‘promoting British values in ...”

“... of the Royal Navy on the popular imagination of Britain is relatively recent, dating from what Peter Padfield refers to as the country’s ‘Navalist awakening’ in the last two decades of the 19th century, when the Admiralty’s dogma that ‘the best guarantee for the peace of the world is a supreme British fleet’ became the leading edge of Imperial ...”

“... as an ironic shorthand for the futility and mendacity of US policy. Eventually the filmmaker Peter Davis used the phrase as the title for his 1974 documentary which exposed the American invaders’ casual brutality and indifference towards Asian lives. Clinton was involved, however tangentially, in the antiwar counterculture. Yet, like everyone else in ...”

“... things: Of Machonachie, Paxton, Tickler, and Gloucester’s Stephens; Fray Bentos, Spiller and Baker, odds and evens Of trench food ...                                            (‘Laventie’) And of songs: ‘David of the White Rock’, the ‘Summer Song’ so soft, and that Beautiful tune to which roguish ...”

“... bells had not been evacuated from St Catherine, St John, St Brigit, Saints Barbara, Elizabeth, Peter and Paul, from Trinity to Corpus Christi, melted in their belfries and dripped away without pomp or ceremony. In the Big Mill red wheat was milled. Butcher Street smelled of burnt Sunday roast. The Municipal Theatre was giving a premiere, a one-act play ...”

“... facilitate his voyeuristic impulses. This was not true: the mirror belonged to Keeler’s friend Peter Rachman, the slum landlord. But at the trial it became the symbol of ‘the very depths of lechery and depravity’ to which Ward was willing to sink. Griffith-Jones instructed the jury that it was their patriotic duty to convict such a man. The judge, Sir ...”