“... and, for some, surprisingly – to be charged with the murder. The trial is due to start in May, but serious doubts remain as to whether the evidence thus far mobilised against him – all of it circumstantial – is strong enough to secure a conviction. If the last three years have proved anything at all, it is that hope triumphs over experience with ...”

“... Minister, the crooked East End businessman Lord Brayley, had he lived to face the music. Wilson may have tried, as Leigh suggests, to act as honest broker with the Russians. On the other hand, he gave his unequivocal support to the American slaughter in Vietnam; to racialist immigration controls; to charges within the National Health Service; to statutory ...”

“... slightly, as if a passing wind had brushed their backs. It was impossible to see if some signal may have been given. They seemed to have settled to these new positions wearily, as if they could barely give the matter their full attention. Nothing else happened.     Then Mars, as if suddenly galvanised by physical discomfort, like Uncle Alfred and the ...”

“... oeuvre real harm, not so much by causing readers to think less of his character (as readers may have been led to think less of Robert Frost), but simply by deflecting the focus of people’s attention. Rereading Cheever, it’s hard now not to be on the qui vive for signs of how his complicated, compulsively deceiving sexuality enters the texture of his ...”

“... like Churchill’s riposte – ‘Young man, these all seem to me to be positive advantages’ – may have been somewhat improved in the course of subsequent repetition, it nonetheless tells us much about Lloyd. Such anecdotes did not attach themselves to Eden or Macmillan, still less would either man have encouraged their propagation. Indeed Eden later ...”

“... line of false assumptions that mesmerised Americans in Vietnam. ‘Psychologists or sociologists may explain some day,’ Henry Kissinger believes, ‘what it is about that distant monochromatic land, of green mountains and fields merging with an azure sea, that for millennia has acted as a magnet for foreigners who sought glory there and found ...”

“... party is the seven-year-old adopted (grand)son of Iglaq’s own adoptive mother. Since Iglaq may neither complain to the child’s parents nor punish him – local people almost never intervene beyond the sphere of their immediate family – he quietly assimilates his loss and the subject is dropped. Aamnigauraq: ‘You live in England? They taken away ...”

“... gossip thinly disguised as fiction, prompted one suicide and general outrage. Unbelievable as it may seem, Capote failed to foresee that ‘La Côte Basque’ – named after a Manhattan restaurant – would rouse such enmity. Answered Prayers was to be his most ambitious work, an exposé of the very rich. Absurdly, he insisted on comparing his work in ...”

“... and the regimen of the inhuman. Joseph de Maistre’s ‘night-vision’ in the Soirées may well be the principal feat of precise foresight in the history of modern political thought and theory. It makes the ‘futurology’ of Rousseau, of Hegel and Marx look utterly shallow. The age of the Gulag and of Auschwitz, of famine and of ubiquitous ...”

“... the Prophet Mohammad: ‘Wish death and welcome after-life.’ The liberation of Khorramshahr in May 1982 did not bring with it repopulation. The city was used as a springboard for an Iranian offensive across the Shatt al Arab river – a strategy which cost hundreds of thousands of lives and produced nothing but prolonged and pointless stalemate. The ...”

“... pads about the courtyards, apartments and offices of the development on the site of the Bryant & May match factory in the East End, and chronicles its decline from megalomaniac promises about ‘the ultimate in Metropolitan Lifestyles’ to a half-built muddle crippled by ballooning costs and interest rates: a lesson for its prospective tenants about ...”

“... to express her appreciation of the honour you have done her and regret for any inconvenience she may have caused you, together with the hope that the butter proved to be to your taste.’ One understands why Rousseau should have written such a letter in response to an incident that was highly appropriate to his most recent publication. But typically, he ...”

“... and depressions which were exacerbated by unsatisfactory love affairs, saddened them. There may even be a little guilt in it. Every time and place has its characteristic luxuries. In Minton’s Soho they were champagne and taxis. Minton was always better off than most of his friends, and sometimes very much richer (the money came from department ...”

“... a case which had been described as ideal for the purpose, with Iraq so dependent on imports. One may suspect that the most powerful motive for this was impatience, but there was another much more respectable one: concern for the Kuwaitis, who were being subjected to a senselessly cruel regime of looting, pillaging, torture and murder. A vivid account of life ...”

“... out there, something free of the law, free of any comforting faith in a God whose motives may be explained through our own, something that has become the map of my heart.’ The dangers in dealing with this kind of material are self-evident: the world certainly doesn’t need an Australian Dances with Wolves (Dances with Dingoes, maybe?). But Hall ...”