“... a collection of M-O ‘day reports’ on George VI’s coronation, published under the title May the Twelfth, he was sure it marked the beginning of an entirely new form of literature. He thought of the methods of Mass-Observation less as sociology than as a kind of poetry, one which, in Roland Penrose’s words, paid particular attention to ‘what was ...”

“... The previous year, her reception in Europe had been just as harsh. ‘As to her talents we may safely assert she never possessed any,’ the critic from the Sunday Times wrote. ‘Lola Montez has had a more complete fiasco than it is possible to imagine,’ a Belgian critic reported, going on to say that while she had never been blessed with any ...”

“... of methamphetamine would outrank every other manufacturing industry in California. Methamphetamine may be especially in demand of late – one can never know such things with any certainty – but it is only one of many compounds that have been declared illegal over the years: ‘huge’ seizures recently announced featured Ecstasy tablets imported from ...”

“... in’ or ‘taking out’, as porous or trussed, open or closed, is not clear, but that may be the point: like the two states that underlie them, these two strategies are bound up with each other. In this light his collecting was another way of being porous to the world, and his being porous another way to defend against images and objects – that ...”

“... must have increased his unpopularity with his jailers. ‘No matter what precautions I may take I am quite certain that these convulsions and spasms, not to mention the physical pain, can be heard as far as the Faubourg St Antoine.’ Sade was always attracted by ‘vice’ and, as he wrote from his cell at Vincennes in 1782, ‘always thought that ...”

“... Sixty years ago, on Sunday, 18 May 1941, Admiral Lutjens took the battleship Bismarck, the pride of the German Navy, out to sea from Gdynia in the Gulf of Danzig, along with the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen. His mission was to sink as many ships of the vital Atlantic convoys as possible. He hoped to skirt the Norwegian coast, unseen, and filter through the Denmark Strait, north of Iceland ...”

“... on their own to make a children’s story – which, to give Hooper the benefit of the doubt, may be the point. ‘A child’s book of true crime’ is oxymoronic. The closest approximation to such a thing may, in fact, be Veronica Marne’s Murder at Black Swan Point. When Spufford ‘ventured out among the modern ...”

“... soldiers screaming abuse at him and taking pictures, before shackling and forcibly shaving him. It may have been a yearning for coherence amid these conflicting signals that drove Begg to embrace Islamic religious practice so intensely. From the evidence in the book, it’s not clear. He is not a mystic; he doesn’t enter into the religious transports which ...”

“... writes, ‘became a pattern that would allow Jack to pursue a political career . . . Between May 1955 and October 1957, while he was launching his Vice-Presidential and Presidential bids, he was secretly hospitalised nine times.’ Here is Dallek’s depiction of Kennedy’s health at an early point in his Presidency: The bone loss and destruction in ...”

“... and Harris wanted to set up ‘an extremely interesting experiment with the Germans’. In May 1940, three German planes on a mission to bomb a French airfield near Dijon went off course and bombed Freiburg. Hitler blamed it on the British and pledged a fivefold revenge. The war of terror was underway. Each side was going to put the other’s ...”

“... E.A. Poe’ – as if, he realises, Poe were thinking: ‘Damn it, I could use some of that, it may not be so hot, but it is at least too good to waste on my foster father.’ It’s a refreshingly unromantic take on the old romantic preoccupation with the writer’s relation to posterity. The overriding impression in this collection, however, is of a slack ...”

“... of small businessmen saw their city as a major economic centre of the future, unlikely as that may have seemed. In fact, the jump-start came with World War Two and the Cold War. Phoenix housed three military bases and a growing number of enterprises that benefited from what Goldwater’s Republican nemesis, Eisenhower (a man far too ‘liberal’ for the ...”

“... the wind-farm gold-rush. Of course there are animals and birds, which look wild and free, but you may be sure they’ve been counted, ringed maybe, even radio-tagged, and all for good scientific reasons. And if we do find a Wild Place, we can prance about there knowing that no bears or wolves will appear over the bluff, because we disposed of the top ...”

“... in a mirror. (Courbet painted two fabulous pictures of Whistler’s mistress doing just that.) You may guess that a painter of this persuasion is not much concerned with bipedalism, and has no time to waste on the feel of the ground underfoot. Hands and orifices are what concern him. Almost never in Courbet does the bottom edge of a painting establish a ground ...”

“... and Ohio primary results made clear that this book has at least a hundred pages yet to go. This may not seem a very grown-up way of following an election, but it’s been forced on us by the apparent shortage of serious policy differences between the two remaining candidates. The questions of whether or not the future president should meet with Mahmoud ...”