“... 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 ...”

“... usually say about life on earth: it certainly seems a bit short on the Pauline virtue of hope, say.Nancy Mitford remembered reproaching Waugh for behaving with quite unprompted unkindness to a young admirer at dinner: ‘You have no idea how much nastier I would be if I was not a Catholic,’ he replied. ‘Without supernatural aid I would hardly be ...”

“... and apologise to those he’d forgotten to acknowledge. They include Jared Kushner’s father, Charles, now Trump’s ambassador to France. In one hasty passage, Sarkozy remembers to doff his cap to Kushner Sr after politely declining his offer of a visit in prison, which Sarkozy’s lawyers believed might compromise his appeal. They had a point: Kushner ...”

“... other things he mentions not feeling he belongs to ‘the English Literary Happy Family’, as I hope neither do I.21 March. Reading a book about William Morris and Kelmscott, I come across a reminiscence by Philip Webb, who remarked to W.R. Lethaby: ‘The best of those times was that there was no covetousness; all went into the common stock … and then we ...”

“... than New York, numerically speaking. His list of a score or so in which ‘a worthwhile novel can hope for notice’ has changed slightly since 1978, but most surviving papers on the list have considered Other People in the first three weeks.Twenty-odd reviewing outlets, however, are as nothing to the number of new novels in English that get published in ...”

“... herself: ‘Ireland insists that Yeats be buried here.’ De Valera’s wire to her read: ‘We hope that his body will be laid to rest in his native soil.’ Yeats himself had written to Dorothy Wellesley five months before his death: ‘I write my poems for the Irish people, but I am damned if I will have them at my funeral. A Dublin funeral is something ...”