“... been much more attractive to me with cropped hair and in evening dress’); Wells looking ‘fat, brown and perky’; Chesterton ‘enormous, streaming with sweat, his hair dripping’; Arnold Bennett ‘very pert and looking every inch a cad’; Churchill having the appearance of ‘a drug-taker’. Perhaps there isn’t anything for me to feel guilty ...”

“... down the dark corridors of the Hotel Intercontinental in Kabul, trying to keep up with him and Ben Brown and Mark Urban from the BBC, who have longer legs than me. I remember him being very interested in television and not very interested in newspapers. Richard speaks well of him, though. Paul and I consolidate our cars. Now we have just one between us, a red ...”

“... she could close America’s political divide’) to the Democratic nomination and then defeating John McCain in the presidential election – he felt he had proved something both about himself and his country. ‘My having been elected president was proof that the American idea endures.’ It’s a big claim. No one else, by implication, could make ...”

“... At one dinner party of New Age contributors, Mansfield – who was going by Yékaterina – met John Middleton Murry, an Oxford student who was starting up an art and literary magazine of his own, Rhythm. He was already her fan: ‘In a German Pension seemed to express, with a power I envied, my own revulsion from life,’ he would write in his ...”

“... had another connection to Jane Elgee before her marriage. In a letter to his son William in 1921, John Butler Yeats wrote of Jane Wilde: ‘When she was Miss Elgee, Mrs Butt found her with her husband when the circumstances were not doubtful, and told my mother about it.’ Butt enjoyed various romances, and was, on occasion, heckled at public meetings by the ...”

“... in the background, or with one of her poodles, but sometimes she is simply herself: a presence in brown corduroy. Or there is the famous portrait by Picasso from 1905, with the face he added in later, not so much a face as a mask, and her joke about it, in Toklas’s voice: ‘After a little while I murmured to Picasso that I liked his portrait of Gertrude ...”

“... won admirers among the black writers who emerged during the Black Power era, such as LeRoi Jones, John A. Williams and Ishmael Reed. And his legacy now? As Jackson writes, ‘history has borne out some of his vinegary judgments.’ Today, Himes’s belief in the implacable force of white supremacism – what is now called Afro-pessimism – enjoys a growing ...”

“... internationally admired LT was notable for being allowed by the government to do what Gordon Brown’s Treasury forbids Transport for London to do in the 21st century: issue bonds and solicit credit underwritten by the government, which means that loans can be obtained more cheaply. Wolmar runs briskly through the history of the Underground from its ...”

“... to mind an image drawn from another sport: Lucy endlessly lining up the football for Charlie Brown to kick, only to pull it away at the last moment and send him flying. Obama did the opposite of that. He went out of his way to ensure the ball was where it needed to be. All she had to do was swing. And she whiffed. The tug-of-war between the two sides of ...”

“... million items a day. Michael Fehilly, Gatwick’s manager, strode around in a grey pinstripe suit, brown loafers and an open-necked pink shirt. He’s second-generation Irish. ‘My dad tells me I’m a plastic Paddy, not a real one,’ he said. He grew up on a council estate in Peckham and joined the Post Office as an apprentice postman in 1987, aged 17. He ...”

“... arms tied tightly behind their backs. The ones I saw were being guarded, not by Americans, but by brown-skinned ARVN soldiers, men of their own size and race, incongruous in alien boots and uniforms. From one of these groups an American officer, recognising me as a correspondent (I had a camera, a bush hat and carried no weapon), introduced himself as an ...”

“... years and to deploy 6000 National Guard along the length of the frontier. The bill is sponsored by John McCain (Arizona), who, like George W. Bush, was once an immigration liberal but sees where the votes have come to lie in recent years. Two highly visible protagonists in the immigration drama, Salvador Reza and the Republican state senator, Russell ...”

“... the avoidance of which came to be both liberalism’s central aim and its chief selling point. For John Rawls, the most influential exponent of postwar liberalism, Freudianism, like Marxism, ‘destroys the game of reasoning’ by reducing ‘men’s opinions’ to hidden causes, whether repressed wishes or material interests.* In an unpublished paper from ...”

“... Pervez Musharraf. The single, strong parent in this case was a desperate State Department – with John Negroponte as the ghoulish go-between and Gordon Brown as the blushing bridesmaid – fearful that if it did not push this through both parties might soon be too old for recycling. The bride was certainly in a hurry, the ...”