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“... Fox thinks that the cult of the belle also was the result of defeat: ‘The belles became the pure white maidens of Provençal romance, antidotes to the surrounding blackness, whose honour was, literally, worth dying for ... The adulation of the belles had a direct relation to Virginia’s sense of defeat, the sense of injustice that could hardly be addressed ...”

“... lurched drunkenly from one side to the other depending upon whether the State Department or the White House was in command. This book shows that when President Truman consulted his advisers on the eve of partition about whether the United States should recognise the state of Israel he had already pledged himself secretly to the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann ...”

“... a dark and very ancient stone chamber where there is a teenage girl of exquisite beauty, wearing white satin and kneeling upon a velvet cushion, blindfold. She is supported, tenderly, by a gentleman in a black cloak and looked on by a large man in red tights who holds an axe. In front of her, between her and us, there is a wooden block surrounded by fresh ...”

“... triumphant. It describes how wealthy twin sisters from Ayrshire, blue-stockings who in fact wore white stockings, travelled to St Catherine’s Monastery in Sinai and discovered an early version of the Gospels, which was being used, a page at a time, to serve pats of butter. Not every well-bred Scots lady can identify a greasy Syriac palimpsest at ...”

“... is also a jumper in, a superb starter. What about the opening of The Hind and the Panther? A Milk white Hind, immortal and unchang’d, Fed on the lawns and in the forest rang’d. Or of Absalom and Achitophel? In pious times, ere priestcraft did begin, Before polygamy was made a sin, When man on many multiplied his kind, Ere one to one was cursedly ...”

“... began defining ‘The Playboy Philosophy’ – a kind of ‘hedonistic utilitarianism’, as William F. Buckley put it. The magazine was originally designed, Hefner admitted, as a ‘romantic reflection of earlier times’. His achievement was to associate sex with upward mobility by making his readers feel they were part of an elite gentlemen’s ...”

“... is the lives of fatalistic losers. The book takes off from an idea latent in Don DeLillo’s White Noise: a patient receives a death sentence but lacks discernible symptoms; in this case, there is also no discernible cause, no airborne toxic event. The condition, called Goldfarb-Blackstone Preparatory Extinction Syndrome, aka PREXIS, becomes a sensation ...”

“... and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.’ Later still, as America stood on the verge of involvement in a foreign conflict, he warned against the ‘demagogues’ who would suppress dissent in order to push their war agenda: Any argument against the ...”

“... Pavilion, there is a monument in which large statues of J.J. Roberts, the first President, and William Tubman, head of state from 1944 to 1971, face one another beside an inscription listing the country’s Americo-Liberian leaders under the portentous heading: ‘These men have governed Liberia.’ The 19th-century colonising elite of American freed ...”

“... enemies by remote control. American initiatives in Vietnam had anticipated this development. Igloo White, which cost $7 billion, was an early attempt to automate the battlefield: tens of thousands of sensors, designed to pick up sound or movement, each one in radio contact with computers in Thailand, were scattered around the jungles of Vietnam and Laos in the ...”

“... furnishings catalogued (McCarthy’s New York apartment in 1933 was ‘painted apricot with white trim, with good closet space, elevator boys and a doorman, Hepplewhite chairs . . . and English ivy in white cachepots from Macy’s’). Indeed almost everything about these ‘epic intellectuals’ interests ...”

“... the concordat that would guarantee continued single-family rule. The interpreter was Colonel William Eddy, a senior US intelligence officer and much else besides. Considered too insecure during the ‘global war on terror’, Suez was rejected as a potential venue for the re-enactment: the grandsons of the two principals and Eddy’s nephew had to make ...”

“... English village. On Thursday 27 December 1756 two of Turner’s neighbours, Thomas Fuller and William Piper, arrived uninvited and stayed smoking and drinking (‘sponging,’ their host records bitterly) until they began to quarrel, because Tho. Fuller told that which in my opinion was really true, viz., Master Piper, being lavish of his professions of ...”

“... of this book, anywhere. They do not appear in the biography of Arthur Machen by Aidan Reynolds and William Charlton, though Peterley Harvest has some vivid pages on Machen. From this biography, published three years after Peterley Harvest, the facts of Peterley’s narrative may be verified. There was, for example, a dinner held in Machen’s honour at the ...”

“... a brilliant machine for the generation of property rights. Security of title was crucial. As Sir William Petty, that ingenious pioneer of statistics who himself acquired huge estates in Ireland, pointed out, ‘there can be no incouragement to industry, where there is no assurance of what shall be gotten by it.’ Jefferson was the Founding Father most ...”