“... minority of the population who are lucky to have supplies provided for them by a publicly financed service.’ So much for the one bright book of life. In addition to his own fieldwork, Mann draws extensively on the statistics which the British book trade and Euromonitor nowadays put out. From Author to Reader provides a handy digest of increased ...”

“... American films of the Forties, such as Body and Soul (1947), written by Polonsky and directed by Robert Rossen, or Polonsky’s Force of Evil (1948), exposed the corrosive effects of a culture devoted to money. The most overtly pro-Soviet films produced in Hollywood, Mission to Moscow (1943), written by Howard Koch, and Song of Russia (1944), written by ...”

“... of 21 July 1973, Archer senior served ‘in the Royal Engineers and then in the diplomatic service, and was once British consul in Singapore’. According to the International Herald Tribune of 4 May 1980, he was ‘an army officer who went through the fall of Singapore – “a very clever but physically depleted worn-out man,” Archer ...”

“... career, and on the worlds that shaped its characteristic contours. After teenage wartime service in the American Navy, Geertz went back to school at Antioch College, where he majored in philosophy and English. On graduation, following the advice of Margaret Mead among others, he enrolled for his doctorate at Harvard’s newly-formed, idiosyncratic ...”

“... He was stocky and fit, but somewhat shortsighted, which had disqualified him from active military service. Along with more than a thousand other prisoners he was transported by train to a prisoner-of war camp in Görlitz, about sixty miles east of Dresden. The journey, more than four hundred miles on a slow train in high summer to an unknown destination, must ...”

“... four children, on 6 January 1916, three months before the Easter Rebellion, in which her father, Robert Brennan, served as a commandant in the Irish Volunteers. Following the surrender ordered by Pearse, he was sentenced first to death and then to penal servitude for life but was released soon after and went on to organise the Department of External Affairs ...”

“... University from 1962 to 1965, before giving up his academic career ‘to devote himself to the service of his people’. In the mid-Sixties he was an aide to George Lincoln Rockwell, editing the American Nazi Party’s magazine, National Socialist World. In late 1967 the ‘American Führer’ (as Rockwell called himself) was assassinated by a disaffected ...”

“... the camera), and because it showed to the full Karel Reisz’s sympathy for people who, in Robert Musil’s words, go out on an adventure and lose their way. This was a key element in all his films, whether they were set in Nottingham, London or Las Vegas. I think especially of the confused and manic Morgan in the film of that name, and of the driven ...”

“... that they were of importance were listed on the front page under the categories of ‘On Active Service’ and ‘Missing’. ARP wardens who died in air-raids were named, perhaps because they were more or less military personnel. And one couple who had a miraculous escape were named in the issue of 11 November 1940: Mr and Mrs A.H. Button. Otherwise, the ...”

“... reading the newspapers of the time can have something of the same effect, as is well conveyed by Robert Kee’s The World We Left behind. But it’s not the same as a single person’s day-by-day account of – not, of course, wie es eigentlich gewesen ist, but – what it eigentlich felt like to that person. The dilemma is whether publication should or ...”

“... life of someone they are liable to end up disliking intensely. Lawrence Thompson was selected by Robert Frost to be his official biographer: after literally living with his subject, the biographer found the poet to be very far from admirable; and the work he produced bore clear evidence of this shift in sentiment. I spent more years than I like to recall ...”

“... diplomat, who had also been a personal assistant to Hammarskjöld, ran into an old acquaintance, Robert Ahier, at the Paris Opéra. Ahier was a journalist and now held a senior position with United Press International. In the course of their conversation, Ahier told Kemoularia that he had a tenuous lead on the fate of the Albertina. He had come across ...”

“... which they staggered in order to become what they are today. Representative democracy, a civil service, even contemporary war descend to us through strange-looking ancestors: the executioners of kings, the treasurer keeping the royal gold under his bed, the marquis riding with his tenantry into the cannon. But capitalism is different. Like Athena born in ...”

“... telegraph to a yacht offshore, and thence by wireless to Section Eight of the German secret service in Berlin. What matters is the efficacy of the code, not the means by which it has been transmitted: a dress is as good a method as an optical telegraph or a wireless set. We may also have noticed, however, that as her initial message is relayed up the ...”

“... on one side and the Houses of Parliament on the other, while Lenin, William Morris, Marx, Engels, Robert Owen and a multitude of workers look on in approval.The pedigree of the mural was impeccable – Hastings painted it with the assistance of the muralist Clifford Wight, and both men had worked with Diego Rivera in the US – but today it is as embarrassing ...”