“... former Communists (and/or sympathisers) that included Gide, Silone and Koestler; it was edited by Richard Crossman and the Congress distributed it. Carefully negotiating my way through a maze of booksellers’ wares laid out on the pavement alongside Ezbekieh Gardens in Cairo in late 1957, I was brought up short by a large pile of TGTFs stacked in front of ...”

“... was nothing like the one he tarted up for his memoirs. Brussel’s real advice was to search White Plains, New York for an egomaniacal German high-school graduate in his forties with a facial scar; an expert in bomb-making; a man who had ‘a classic textbook case of paranoia’, rather than a genuine beef. Whoops. The evidence which led to the capture ...”

“... and self-discipline, and a deep hatred of the United States and the Western way of life. As Richard Hofstader and others have argued, for more than two hundred years this kind of combination has always acted as a prompt for paranoid and reactionary conspiracy theories, most of them groundless. Now the threat is real; and for the foreseeable future we ...”

“... was far greater than Bill Clinton’s (Dallek found that Kennedy, too, had an affair with a White House intern), but he had the good fortune not to be found out – Bobby had some delicate negotiations with J. Edgar Hoover. Kennedy essentially didn’t care much about women; he enjoyed the chase more than the conquest, and, according to other ...”

“... man in a hat and suit rolls by behind them; a smart gentleman with a cane silhouetted against a white circle painted on a fence, as if in the final diminishing frame of a silent movie; a group of children clambering around rubble, one of them almost seeming to burst out of the photograph itself. A year later he went to Mexico, where he hung out with ...”

“... cohesion. Classes consolidate, whites push down on blacks, blue collars are hemmed in by white collars, and grey flannel suits march down city streets lined with offices and banks. Auschwitz may have been a world away from Levittown, but in Hannah Arendt’s vision of totalitarianism – ‘destroying all space between men and pressing men against ...”

“... so archaic, so self-confounding, so remote from the basic American consensus, ever got so far?’ Richard Hofstadter asked. Graffiti artists shared the intelligentsia’s disdain and defaced Goldwater’s campaign billboards, appending the word ‘Wing’ to his slogan ‘In Your Heart You Know He’s Right.’ Others added the coda: ‘In Your Guts You Know ...”

“... not a talker’ (a phrase with an interesting provenance – it goes back to the First Murderer in Richard III, by way of Bob Dole in his failed bid for the presidency in 1996). But it’s a line that unwittingly draws attention to the intellectual as well as the rhetorical limits of her candidacy. ‘We can get back on the path we were on,’ she ...”

“... of adoration and welcome which lay people were expected to adopt at this point in the Mass (Richard II adopts the same posture in the Wilton Diptych). But both Charles Martel and the painting’s viewer are distracted by the appearance of an angel, who descends from the top of the frame towards the altar, holding a letter of absolution for the secret ...”

“... Bibles into heathen lands. He wrote back, suggesting I finish my A-levels. I read the Reverend Richard Wurmbrand’s Tortured for Christ, and Frank Morison’s Who Moved the Stone? I read Nicky Cruz’s Run, Baby, Run, and books by Charles Colson, books which are still in print years after their first publication, Christian megasellers. I also spent a lot ...”

“... little tooth of some ferret or stoat’, used to burnish the gold leaf of inscriptions; and a white feather to brush away any troublesome particles. The vellum he favoured was not just top-quality calfskin. It was ‘virgin parchment, such as never bore hair’: the skin of ‘young things found in the dam’s belly’ – Hilliard called it ...”

“... song seems to emerge from the collective mouth of the dead – the dead lying on the lawn of the White House during any given presidency, victims of a regime whose face changes but whose hands are always the same. The second comes during ‘Molasses to Rum’, chillingly delivered by Edward Rutledge, the delegate from South Carolina who will not vote for ...”

“... an antique fair. That’s just how we are I’m afraid.’ This is an arch piece of marketing from Richard Osman, promoting his detective novels to an American readership. There’s no reason to suppose that British people are better at hiding in plain sight than anyone else. However, they do like a murder story, and a thriving industry has grown up around ...”

“... queen than her grandfather Henry VII; Shakespeare’s first tetralogy moves from Henry VI through Richard III to the arrival of Henry Tudor, who would become Henry VII of England. These plays staged and applauded, Shakespeare turned to a prequel sequence, from Richard II through Henry IV to Henry V. From this a curious ...”

“... decades since Moss was photographed by Corinne Day for the Face, those instantly iconic black and white images of a skinny 16-year-old on Camber Sands, wearing no make-up and very few clothes, grinning through her freckles and pointy teeth, all at once so English, so ordinary and so glamorous. And it’s four decades since David Bowie – wearing a lot of ...”