“... 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 ...”

“... of John Butler Yeats, which had been transcribed, then typed, then donated to the library by William M. Murphy, John Butler Yeats’s biographer. And now I looked up from the Yeats letters to find a man looking at me. It struck me immediately who he was. He was William M. Murphy himself, the author of Prodigal ...”

“... but to use their theories to leave the world a better place than they found it. Their leader is William MacAskill, a 28-year-old lecturer at Oxford. As graduate students MacAskill and his friend Toby Ord committed themselves to donate most of their future earnings to charity (in MacAskill’s case anything above £20,000, in Ord’s £18,000), and set ...”

“... had no source but Beer it had to be discarded. Out went an early love interest, Helen Trent, whose white arms were ‘the most beautiful … I ever saw’. Out went Crane’s dismissal of Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata – ‘an old maid’s picnic’ so boring, Crane said (maybe), that he couldn’t finish it. Out went several significant details in a story ...”

“... that eventually led to current, commonly held tenets about the attentions fitting to a corpse. William Price, d.1893, was an arch druid in Wales, a surgeon, a Chartist, a vegetarian, a philoprogenetive advocate of free love, who called his child, born in his late years, Jesu Grist (sic). When the baby died, he tried to burn him on a pyre, according to ...”

“... for authority. Ginsberg often claims to have issued indirectly from Whitman’s and directly from William Carlos Williams’s overcoat: but Williams’s presence of mind in language is quite different from Ginsberg’s, and his poems are far more fully composed. Most of Ginsberg’s poems document his time and collapse into it. They haven’t survived the ...”

“... the sort of charity-show swagger that mugs you with its understated discretion. Brilliant white collars, sharp enough to chop onions. Exuberant manacles of cuff. Silk ties forcibly repressed into knuckle sized knots. Ferociously bulled black shoes to mirror the action, dizzy from stomping on rib cages, hacking at kidneys, leaving hoofprints of polish ...”