“... then a common soldier cheated of his pay by corrupt officers, crippled by a shot fired by cannon sold to the enemy by English arms dealers, and ignored or ridiculed when he returns home to a country that has no use for disabled veterans. In his third incarnation, the Ant, having been ‘unfruitfully led to the lickerish study of poetry’, composes ...”

“... shower with his ‘drip-dry’ suit on. He was married four times, and had one daughter, with Dyan Cannon. In 1968 he joined the board of the Fabergé toiletries company, describing himself as a ‘travelling businessman’. ‘How old cary grant?’ read the telegram from a magazine. ‘Old Cary Grant fine. How you?’ was the actor’s now legendary ...”

“... relaxed and informal with his patients; directors of research programmes felt him to be a loose cannon, uninterested in measurement and statistics. But he quickly made his way, and five years after arrival, applying for naturalisation, he decided to change his name to Erikson. He was criticised for this change, with its implication of anti-semitism. It was ...”

“... children had been thrown, was ‘sacred ground’. Dyer, like Neill and the equally psychopathic John Nicholson, was notable for his piety. Wagner might also have reached further back, to Rollo Gillespie’s execution of hundreds of unarmed prisoners in a fives court after the mutiny at Vellore in 1806, which recalls Dyer’s brutal floggings on the tennis ...”

“... which led some to gravitate toward the fringes of American society both left and right. John Rambo, for his part, did both. In First Blood (1982), Sylvester Stallone’s character is a ‘half-German, half-Indian’ veteran, traumatised by the war, who arrives in a small town to pay his respects to a black comrade killed by exposure to Agent ...”

“... improve train protection since the Hidden Report. The inquiries into the accidents at Hyde (1990), Cannon Street and Newton Junction, Glasgow (1991) and Cowden (1994) recommended that ATP should be fitted throughout the network. ATP would have prevented the accidents at Watford (1996), Southall and Winsford (1997), and Spa Road and Ladbroke Grove (1999). You ...”

“... Revolution, having convinced the Mexican government to lend him 500 soldiers, 10,000 guns and 50 cannon. Eisenstein left Mexico for the US in mid-March. He spent just under three weeks in New York, where he was able to see some of the rushes for the film (Salazkina is mistaken in saying that he ‘never lived to see any of his footage’) before departing on ...”

“... the treasurer keeping the royal gold under his bed, the marquis riding with his tenantry into the cannon. But capitalism is different. Like Athena born in armour, it bursts on the scene already mature. The sort of joint-stock venture capitalism that swept over north-western Europe in the 17th century lacked the refinements of a 21st-century public limited ...”

“... of my childhood. 10 February. Finish with some regret Frances Spalding’s book on the Pipers, John and Myfanwy, the latter figuring in The Habit of Art where she is to some extent disparaged. I’ve always been in two minds about Piper, liking him when I was young with his paintings ‘modern’ but representational enough to be acceptable, a view I ...”

“... facilely grouped as a cetacean school of Great White Males (Styron, Norman Mailer, James Jones, John Updike, Saul Bellow, Gore Vidal, J.D. Salinger, Joseph Heller, the recently retired Philip Roth), whose ghostly father and bearded Neptune disturbing the liquor cabinet deep into the night was Ernest Hemingway. Even those least influenced by Hemingway’s ...”

“... off Bonnie and Clyde – went to see him in The Indian Wants the Bronx in which he appeared with John Cazale, who would play Fredo in The Godfather. The first performances of The Indian Wants the Bronx were in a venue so tiny that the audience had to walk across the stage to reach the exit. But then it moved to a venue off Broadway, which is where Dunaway ...”

“... to be repeated a mind-numbing 840 times. The piece wasn’t performed in full until 1963, when John Cage managed it with a relay team of 11 pianists: it took 18 and a half hours. The relationship with Valadon was, as far as we know, the last sexual relationship Satie had.His despondency slowed down his rate of production. For at least two years, his friend ...”

“... a firm most notable for creating the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, who, in 2004, derailed John Kerry’s presidential campaign by claiming he had been falsely decorated as a war hero. CRC – it stands for Creative Response Concepts – is also the publicist for the Federalist Society, which, in the Trump era, has successfully promoted the appointment ...”

“... the Far East. Up-to-date forts and arsenals were constructed under French direction, war ships and cannon supplied. It must have been the first decisive impact of fire-power on warfare in Indochina, in 1802, the Nguyen dynasty returned to the throne, ‘essentially a counter-revolutionary regime’. A dozen years later, the Bourbons returned to Paris in the ...”

“... to ‘avoid the fatally simple remedy of an authoritarian regime that would use the population as cannon-fodder in the fight for economic achievement’? ‘Where is compound interest taking us?’ Rostow asked on another occasion. ‘Is it taking us to communism; or to the affluent suburbs?’ Are we headed ‘to destruction; to the moon; or where?’ The ...”