“... what I thought of Hitler’, and she was intensely proud of the British Empire. According to Sir Charles Powell, probably the most influential private secretary she had in Downing Street, the Prime Minister was in thrall to childhood memories. ‘For a small girl growing up in Grantham the Germans were about as evil as anything you could think of.’ In that ...”

“... Nixon Administration, but the President and Kissinger didn’t know that. Nixon therefore ordered Charles Colson, an official on his staff, to come up with a plan to ‘neutralise’ Ellsberg. Colson in turn enlisted the services of a former CIA officer called Howard Hunt, who had been the mastermind behind the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba. Hunt had ...”

“... the daylights out of the South so as to soften up the opposition before the main assault. Like Charles Krauthammer, the Washington Post columnist, like the conservatives and liberals who argued for war in 2003, and said that Saddam Hussein, the Hitler of our time, must not be appeased, and this mustn’t turn into Munich all over again, Adelman demanded ...”

“... and finally in England, one of a circle of painters that included Anthony van Dyck at the Court of Charles I, the most important collector of paintings of the age. As the principal relation of Artemisia’s life is to this severe, rejecting father, the most amply and thrillingly narrated event in the novel is the journey Artemisia makes alone, by sea and ...”

“... even by the industrial East. Stanford’s fellow tycoons in these projects were Mark Hopkins, Charles Crocker and Collis P. Huntington – ‘and their corruption was as big as their profit,’ Solnit says. These ‘Big Four’, all former Sacramento storekeepers who had sold goods to Gold Rush miners, had come to monopolise political and economic power ...”

“... the Bolivians that he was a journalist, sympathetic to Che, and had come to the country in the hope of interviewing him, his alibi looked shaky. He had spent two weeks moving around with Che: he was briefed to relay advice from Havana and to return with news for the Jefe. Che, in Debray’s reckoning, was by now a rebel miles off compass from any ...”

“... better than to Come & See.As early as 1831, Talbot had been present – along with Brewster and Charles Babbage – when Herschel showed them, over breakfast at Babbage’s house, the principle behind modern-day platinum prints. Herschel had found an old crucible of platinum salts left behind by his late father, the court astronomer William Herschel, and ...”

“... of the Western allies and the substantial egos of Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle, Field Marshal Montgomery and General Patton. Dad thought Eisenhower was a man with ballast, a leader. But the Finnegans wanted to argue Ike’s policies.Note the trace of red-baiting in the bit about the steel company (‘un-American’); the ...”

“... later, was in America with his wife, Georgiana, trying to make his fortune; his dearest friend, Charles Armitage Brown, was on a summer walking tour, having frugally rented out the house he had been sharing with Keats since Tom’s death nearly two years before. No one would come with Keats to the warm climate his doctors prescribed. Keats’s friends had ...”

“... to do a fair amount of that.You weren’t encouraged, as we were, to go in for little whimsical Charles Lamb-like essays? Writing trivia about trivia?No. The senior English master was a raging Leavisite, an absolute caricature.Had he been to Cambridge?No, he’d been to Southampton and had been thoroughly instructed there by a sub-Leavisite. At that ...”

“... P. Adams Sitney, who was about to go to Yale. ‘Sitney’s poetic passions that summer included Charles Olson, Ezra Pound, Virgil and Sextus Propertius.’ He also introduced his girlfriend to Andy Warhol, Jack Smith, Carolee Schneemann. ‘Her eyes opened wide.’In later years, Acker often said that she had studied linguistics under Roman Jakobson. This ...”

“... books I swotted up for my scholarship. Remembering Bruce MacFarlane was at Dulwich, I wander into Charles Barry’s huge hammerbeam hall, the walls lined with honours boards of distinctions at Oxford and Cambridge chiefly; though there’s some mention of the Army and the Indian Civil Service, there is none of any other universities or places of higher ...”

“... time-bomb and funding was increased for Western radio broadcasts into Central Asia in the hope of exploiting Islam’s anti-Soviet potential. The notion of a looming Muslim revolt could not have been more wrong. When the Soviet Union started to wobble in 1989, the Central Asian republics were conspicuous by their quiescence. Unlike the Baltic states ...”

“... tribes – the core of the Armed Forces – support him means that Abdullah may represent the best hope for internal stability, even if he is not an enthusiastic backer of some perceived ‘Western interests’, such as arms sales. Despite an intermittent speech impediment, Abdullah can express himself forcibly and he clearly intends to clean up Saudi ...”

“... children who’ve lost their way’. I don’t like to leave without a modest offer of hope. ‘The RPF is advancing rapidly. Soon they’ll reach Butare, and it’ll all be over. Just hold out for a few more days!’ I stare into bitter smiles. ‘That’s no solution,’ someone says. ‘Why not?’ ‘Because they’ll kill us.’ ‘But why on ...”