“... from what we might call their apparent ordinariness, and only occasionally, as with Jim Carrey or Robin Williams, does an actor come along who seems to have the superhuman plasticity of a cartoon. These movie actors, whatever else they happen to be, are works of animation: they can make their faces, and their emotions, do anything, and they live their ...”

“... a circle of butter. This is the poem in full:Who carved on the butter print’s round open faceA cross-hatched head of rye, all jags and bristles?Why should soft butter bear that sharp deviceAs if its breast were scored with slivered glass?When I was small I swallowed an awn of rye.My throat was like standing crop probed by a scythe.I felt the edge slide and ...”

“... it. For these years are an extraordinary saga of unhappening. Again and again, Henry plans to cross over to France to recover the lands in Normandy and Anjou that his father lost, but every time the expedition is aborted, usually for lack of funds – in 1223, 1226, 1227 and 1229. In 1230, Henry does get as far as Nantes, where he dallies, according to ...”

“... technologists, to the person quaking on the ground beneath the planes. More or less absent from Robin Neillands’s The Bomber War, a defence of Bomber Harris, the victims keep appearing here, crowding out the ingenious scientists and the heroic airmen. Some are hardened corpses, melted in their own blackened fat in the shelters or laid out in rows ‘liked ...”

“... on its theoretical turn in 1962, the ‘virtuoso eloquence’ of Perry Anderson was backed by Robin Blackburn, ‘a beautiful, big, shock-headed youngster’ who had read Sartre and de Beauvoir in the French. Chubby, chummy and balding, imperturbably good-humoured and everybody’s pal, Inglis has a distinct resemblance to Bob Hoskins, the interfering ...”

“... information led to the arrests of leading jihadis. But Khalid Sheikh Mohammed later told the Red Cross that he also gave false information so as to confuse the Americans. Crucially, he failed to answer questions about the location of either al-Zawahiri (despite having met him the day before his capture) or bin Laden’s courier, Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, the man ...”

“... to be said; for his admirers, it could sometimes be presented as a de facto virtue in itself. As Robin Purves noted as far back as 1999, ‘Critical consensus about the ethical centre of Prynne’s poetry flourishes without seeming to have understood anything he has written in the last 15 years.’ It’s a rare (and ironic) point of agreement by all ...”

“... into La Catedral, a private prison he had built in Evigado. This ‘temple of perdition’ was a cross between a home office and a Las Vegas penthouse. Escobar was insulated from the police and from his enemies, but still able to manage his cartel. (Joaquin ‘El Chapo’ Guzman, former leader of the Sinaloa cartel, would later make a similar arrangement ...”

“... in the mid-Thirties transformed his life. His journals of the time are the record of a passionate cross-Channel love affair with the Parisian avant garde (and varyingly intellectual fringe members of both sexes on both sides of the Channel). He spent his most creative decade commuting between bohemian Surrealist Paris, dominated by its belligerent ...”

“... of history to please the patriarchy, I’ll move to Canada’), along with a grand tirade by Robin Morgan, a reprise of her 1970 essay ‘Goodbye to All That’: How dare anyone unilaterally decide when to turn the page on history, papering over real inequities and suffering constituencies in the promise of a feel-good campaign? How dare anyone claim to ...”

“... duchesses. Because she wouldn’t speak, they gave her a list of the girls’ names, asking her to cross out the ones that were not hers. She crossed out all except Anastasia. Anna Anderson was five years older than the real Anastasia and, like the Claimant, bore little physical resemblance to the person she was impersonating, being square-jawed and ...”

“... got under way, George Bush was re-elected, and Blackwater executive Gary Jackson sent out a round robin email with the subject line: ‘BUSH WINS FOUR MORE YEARS!! HOOYAH!!’ Scahill is right to identify the death of the four Blackwater men and the subsequent US revenge attack on Fallujah as one of the sharper downward lurches of America’s dismal journey ...”

“... though, in which Raffles, mercurial as ever, shrugs on, if only for the moment, the mantle of Robin Hood. In ‘A Jubilee Present’, Raffles offers his take on the gold cup which is to be presented to the nation to celebrate the queen’s Diamond Jubilee: ‘A number of the immorally rich clubbed together and presented it to the nation; and two of the ...”

“... bad behaviour’. Everything, therefore, depended on the Chinese government, which controls the cross-border oil pipeline and rail and road traffic in and out of North Korea, and could quickly choke any government to death if it chose. For two years Victor Cha was deputy head of the US delegation to the Six-Party Talks. A Georgetown University ...”

“... Mod wideboys? Doubtless it was never quite so cut and dried. Skim the sub rosa lit of the time (Robin Cook, Alexander Baron, Colin MacInnes) and you’re plunged into a lost river with discrete but commingled tributaries: gay, criminal, East End Jewish, upper-class drop-out, lower-class dandy; the ‘morries’ of Cook’s dodgy Chelsea set, and Baron’s ...”