“... like it at the time, but it was a gift, really. About me personally he seldom took issue. If I said something judgmental about someone he’d give me a look. I was once walking down the street in Berkeley with another poet, quite famous, a truly reprehensible shit. He doesn’t care for me either. We’ve just had a rather uncomfortable cup of coffee ...”

“... easily and strongly his feelings were affected. ‘It was a love-match on both sides,’ Johnson said simply. He was born in Market Square, slap bang in the middle of Lichfield, in September 1709, the elder son of Michael Johnson and his wife, Sarah, rather old and very proud parents. They had, Johnson recalled, ‘not much happiness from each other’, and ...”

“... war profoundly changed the financial and political environment of American science. It’s been said that ‘radar won the war; the atomic bomb ended it.’ In 1940 Alvarez was sent off to the MIT Radiation Laboratory in Cambridge, Massachusetts to help develop the British invention of the cavity magnetron into usable ground and aircraft-based radar ...”

“... where the dons dined and, hearing those harsh, quacking tones without knowing whose they were, I said to my neighbour that it sounded like the voice of the devil. Someone better informed put me right. It was Auden, at that time still with blondish hair and the face yet to go under the harrow.I don’t think I’d read much of his poetry or would have ...”

“... change can ever be fully explained. ‘We prove, we do not explain our birth,’ Marianne Moore said. There is always an element of the random in the historical which demands respect. If Shakespeare himself was a romancing artist, old-fashioned beside sophisticated and newly classicising contemporaries, it was perhaps because freer methods allowed him to ...”

“... Another senior al-Qaida figure, Abu al Walid al-Masri, put it even more bluntly. Bin Laden, he said, had led his followers to ‘the abyss’. A decade later those concerns seemed to have been vindicated. By 2011 al-Qaida had been reduced to a few bands of men hiding in the mountains along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. Distracted by the need to evade ...”

“... as it has been technically possible for it to access is widely accepted. In response to Edward Snowden’s leaks, the NSA put out a statement in August to expand on the public description of its mission, defining signals intelligence (or SIGINT) – its primary job – as ‘the production of foreign intelligence through the collection, processing ...”

“... in 1970 by the New York gallerist Richard Feigen. It was a genuine inquiry. He would love, he said, to show women artists. The problem was he couldn’t find any good enough. Stumped for an answer at the time, Nochlin continued to consider the question. Her response came a year later in the form of an essay that appropriated Feigen’s question for its ...”

“... detected through the thicket of names. ‘A wonderful, dainty, very loving little novelist’, he said of his friend Christopher Isherwood. As with many of those who are dependent for their status on the high status of others – none more than Spender, who thought ‘continually of those who were truly great’ – there appeared to be a measure of disdain ...”

“... relationship. Unreasonably, Bandini has just been abusing her shoes: ‘I hate you,’ she said. I felt her hatred. I could smell it, even hear it coming out of her, but I sneered again. ‘I hope so,’ I said. ‘Because there must be something pretty fine about a guy who rates your hatred.’ Then she ...”

“... had by then had a long, long life; his period of renown as psychologist, author and sage could be said to have begun in the mid-1950s, when his book Childhood and Society began to take off; it peaked in 1970, when his picture appeared on the cover of the New York Times Magazine and a Berkeley sociologist quoted by Friedman ...”

“... at the same time not antagonising the National Party government to no good purpose: we must, he said, walk a tightrope through civil war, revolution and any other form of mayhem, and be waiting at the end to embrace the winner. ‘Some sort of war might well have broken out in 1899 even if gold had never been discovered in the Transvaal in 1886,’ Hyam and ...”

“... sisters. In the event, baby Dora died only months after her fictional namesake. The last boy was Edward Bulwer Lytton Dickens, named after the aristocrat and hugely popular novelist, who, needless to say, was a friend of Dickens and published in Household Words. With the one exception of Dora, then (a tribute to his own genius perhaps, since he felt that ...”

“... job to another. An alternative version of him appears in Offshore, written after his death, in Edward, the husband whom his wife Nenna loves but cannot manage, somehow, to live with. ‘And now the quarrel was under its own impetus . . . And the marriage that was being described was different from the one they had known . . . and there was no one to ...”

“... of men on the ground. Two platoons were suggested or even less or a military field hospital. Bundy said that the result of such a contribution would be worth “several hundred million dollars”.’ While this offer seems to have been withdrawn, for fear of alienating Wilson, US memoranda make clear that it represents the thinking of the Johnson ...”