“... story bears similarities to the influential American conspiracist text Behold a Pale Horse by William Cooper (which was published at about the time Icke reinvented himself as a prophet), and to the pseudo-leaks that drive QAnon, though QAnon tends to avoid the extraterrestrial. A cursory and much rationalised summary of Icke’s conspiracy theory goes ...”

“... Even fruit could not escape his portentousness. He liked apples on account of their ‘snow-white meat and ruddy cover’, but it was ‘a metaphysical appetite, for I do not care for their taste’.Schwartz sometimes worried that his intellectualism was willed rather than authentic. In his autobiographical notes, he described ‘trying as before to ...”

“... air – a letter dropped by the Austrians stated simply that he and his observer, 2nd Lieutenant William Watkins, had been niedergeschossen and were dead. Whether they were killed instantly or died of wounds is unclear. In October 1918 two periodicals devoted to the new art of aviation, the Aeroplane and Flight, reported that Fernald had ‘died as a ...”

“... the spirit world. When, in 1905, during a séance in Boston, a medium spoke in the presence of Mrs William James of a communication from a ‘Mary’ to Henry, the message was dutifully passed on to Henry James in England, who wrote that it was his ‘dear Mother’s unextinguished consciousness breaking through the interposing vastness of the universe and ...”

“... Eastwood’s relations with his orang-utang co-star; and his excursions into biography, Bird and White Hunter, Black Heart, are brave if lumbering. But what makes and keeps him a star, as actor and director, is a certain intimacy with screen violence, or with ways of representing violence. His Westerns and his cop movies are what continue to matter, and they ...”

“... services owed at one time a considerable debt to the writers of spy stories – in particular to William Le Queux and Phillips Oppenheim. Le Queux’s hero, Duckworth Drew, whose name rhymed with his own and whose appearance matched his own self-image – ‘unobtrusive, of perfect manner, and a born gentleman’ – is first found outwitting the French ...”

“... of dazzling reef fish – pink and emerald parrotfish, blue and yellow unicorn fish, orange-and-white-striped clownfish – had recently washed up on the shore, dead. The ocean along the western edge of this Fijian island, the ‘big island’ of Viti Levu, had become too hot for its inhabitants to survive. The fish lay rotting in the sun with nubbly ...”

“... of the letter,’ Hershberger remarks. The campaign appears to have been co-ordinated with the White House, and underway long before Fonda went to Hanoi. Hershberger is an assiduous researcher, but she could have got a better idea of the extent of this co-ordination by studying the Nixon Oval Office tapes at the National Archives. On 2 May 1970, Nixon told ...”

“... sharper outlines. Second-tier players have their moment in the limelight: the secretary of state William Seward drinks too much and blusters about invading Canada; the US ambassador Charles Francis Adams keeps a stiff and chilly distance from London society, managing to seem both unformed and overly formal; the Confederate envoy James Mason says ...”

“... Paris; or imprisonment in one of Savak’s prisons. The shah tried to co-opt the left with his ‘white revolution’, an ambitious programme of land reform launched in the early 1960s, but its principal achievement was to disrupt life in the countryside and provoke an exodus of rural migrants to the slums of Tehran, which grew into a centre of ...”

“... the trees. Like all students of Roosevelt, Black draws on the work of pioneering scholars such as William Leuchtenburg, Frank Freidel and Arthur Schlesinger, but he also incorporates a large amount of original material from the Roosevelt Library. And although Black credits a number of research assistants, the argument bears his personal stamp. For ...”

“... men – women weren’t admitted to Magdalen until 1979 – who came good under his supervision: William Hague, found guilty of ‘electoral malpractice’ during his time in the university’s Conservative Association; an advocate, at the Oxford Union, of the birch and stocks; Chris Huhne, later energy secretary in David Cameron’s cabinet; Jeremy ...”

“... Newspaper Axis, American newspaper owners are shown putting their weight behind isolationism, what William Randolph Hearst preferred to call ‘America first’. He commissioned Hitler and Mussolini to write for his many newspapers (at $1 a word), and was delighted that Hitler had restored ‘character and courage’ to Germany. At a time when most Americans ...”

“... pizza on a Friday night. He praised industrial vegetable oils yet had never tasted Nutella.In 1914 William Lever decided to diversify his palm oil empire. Margarine, he thought, had the potential to be a much bigger market than soap, because consumers would always be willing to spend more on feeding themselves than on washing. In the 1880s, Lever and his ...”