“... to hide it. In a tweed jacket, with a moustache and cool good manners, he could be a stand-in for Ronald Colman. He’s made it, he’s settled; he has a wife, Madeleine, who lives down the peninsula. But she’s a remote figure in Elster’s life. On a rich leather chair in his antique office, and then later at his club, he tells Scottie he regrets the ...”

“... school. Selling Russian cars on the US market. I’m trying to get Bill Clinton involved in a green project converting waste to energy: a friend of a friend was at college with Hillary.’ Everyone you meet in Little Russia seems to have another business on the side. At the Cosmos party, doctors I talked to turned out to have a line in real estate; the ...”

“... Todd, to whom he is condemned to read aloud the works of Dickens in perpetuity. Waugh told Henry Green that the novel was about ‘a Gothic man in the hands of savages’ – savages both at home and abroad – ‘and the civilised man’s helpless plight among them’. It is the Black Mischief parallel effect again: the latter pages of the novel switch to ...”

“... foreign policy, they can coalesce to dictate its content. The end of the 1970s was such a moment. Ronald Reagan, a man with few peers at personifying and manipulating the key symbols of American political life, seized on it. For fifteen years history had been conspiring to give him the chance. Fear of falling apart? Only a Pangloss could have lived through ...”

“... pluck the fire-breathing young conservative (at Marquette he had displayed a photo of himself with Ronald Reagan in his dorm room) devoted himself entirely to Republican electoral politics. Here, too, he started out as a failure, running a doomed state legislative campaign in a mainly black, Democratic district of Milwaukee; he was trounced by 38 points. But ...”

“... 37 volumes of the magnificent new edition of his published works – an edition which it has taken Jo Ann Boydston and her collaborators 25 years to produce. The final volume contains a miscellany of pieces which were omitted from earlier volumes. The earliest (written in the mid-1880s) include ‘The Health of Women and Higher Education’ (women can get ...”

“... time ceased to be Scotland: the CIA was in charge. Vincent Cannistraro had made his mark under Ronald Reagan, with a clandestine programme to destabilise the Libyan regime. He boasted that he ‘developed the policy towards Libya’ which culminated in the bombing of Gaddafi’s house in Tripoli in 1986 on the basis of intercept evidence later acknowledged ...”

“... crops and livestock more productive; the introduction of herbicides and pesticides; the so-called Green Revolution of the 1950s; and maybe the yield-increasing, drought and disease-resisting effects of genetically modified crops (if we’re willing to eat them). In Malthus’s time, it took twenty thousand square metres of agricultural land to feed one ...”

“... Yvonne Hegoburu tends the six-and-a-half hectares of her Domaine de Souch according to the Green principles of ‘biodynamie’ and as a homage to her dead husband; in Sardinia, Battista Columbu reckons that he has an ‘ethical commitment’ to continue producing his tiny quantities of unique Malvasia; and in Argentina, an indigenous farmer’s single ...”

“... pledging that they will not cease from mental fight until they have built Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land. So many Jerusalems. It may well be better for your sanity to take one of these journeys than to make a pilgrimage to the place itself. The city of Jerusalem is notorious for inducing the Jerusalem Syndrome, which currently reduces around ...”

“... was Leaving the 20th Century: The Incomplete Work of the Situationist International, a slim green volume published in 1974, crammed with photographs, illustrations and comic strips, compiled and annotated by Christopher Gray. Years later I learned that Gray had rubbed shoulders with McLaren in a Notting Hill group called King Mob, a unofficial affiliate ...”

“... Roundheads and jubilant Cavaliers, the explanation for all the cars some mock-battle in Green Park. Note how one passes these far from sheepish figures without a second glance; the kind of extraordinary feature of ordinary life that never gets into a film except as part of the plot.In the evening, read at St Mark’s, Primrose Hill in aid of the ...”

“... of the new South Africa are those that will decide the destiny of the planet. For Gordimer, unlike J.M. Coetzee, South Africa is still the centre of the world. In Get a Life, Aids and globalisation seize their mainly black victims. Gordimer has always been read predominantly by whites, her grandeur – the Nobel Prize she won in 1991 – viewed by black ...”

“... to big business, and conviction that politicians are out to exploit the common man. In 1980, Ronald Reagan profitably tapped the movement with his promises of states’ rights, low taxes and a shrunken government in Washington; the ‘Reagan Democrats’ who crossed party lines to vote for him are still the most targeted demographic in the country. In ...”

“... of the next hour or so they met other patrol groups from the company. ‘We then did a U-turn on Green 9 and Green 12’ – these were combat zones – ‘and turned into an area known to us as “India”,’ says Lance Sergeant Stephen Phipps. ‘We then made our way through the al-Mukatil al-Araby district. I’m not ...”