“... I doubt if she’ll be pleased.Some of my liking, I confess, arises from sheer Southern California white trash fellow feeling. Pepper was born near Los Angeles and spent most of his rackety life (as I have) on the West Coast. His father was a shipyard worker and nasty alcoholic; his mother, a dim-witted teenage bride, didn’t want him and late in her ...”

“... and Patrick Leigh-Fermor, of R.W.Seton-Watson and Rebecca West. Sorties farther afield – like Peter Fleming’s expeditions to the Gobi or Matto Grosso – were fewer. Paradoxically, the vast expanse of the Empire itself was not fertile soil for this kind of writing. There, British power was too close at hand. It generated another set of forms ...”

“... often from North London to Sloane Square, walking away from the Royal Court Theatre, rounding Peter Jones on Symons Street and turning up towards Cadogan Square. On entering the house, you rose in a coffin-like lift to the top and walked down to the first half-landing, where the door of her place would be open. Inside, if it was summer, you could browse ...”

“... in the back garden of a council house a small pavilion has been set up and two figures in the white suits of forensic experts are lumbering in and out of the house. It’s a crime scene, though Jamie, the cheeky grips, suggests it could be quite a small wedding. When we reach the school they tell us it’s a 30-year-old man, an old boy of the school, who ...”

“... for this was Protestant-ruled Northern Ireland in the 1950s, a place not altogether unlike the white-ruled South Africa evoked in the frank confessional of David Schalkwyk’s opening chapter. In the apartheid world, the young Schalkwyk ‘was defined legally, socially and … psychologically as a “master”’, even as the material realities of bondage ...”

“... such as the US trade representative Robert Lighthizer and Trump’s favourite economic adviser, Peter Navarro, the question is why the effort to enrol China in the world economy was undertaken in the first place, and who benefited from an experiment that has gone so badly wrong.The crude Trumpian take, which is perhaps also the kindest, is that the US ...”

“... more than $500 billion (almost twice the GDP of sub-Saharan Africa), have scaled the walls of the White House. In a bullish five years in the 1990s as CEO of Halliburton, the world’s largest oil and gas services company, Dick Cheney drew $44 million in salary from an outfit that on his own Brechtian admission saw war as offering ‘growth ...”

“... the most information, was, according to Memorial, ‘forcibly shoved, near her apartment, into a white VAZ-2107 sedan and then screamed that she was being kidnapped’. That same evening, I learned that her corpse had been found in the woods on the Ingush border, with several bullets in her head and body, precisely because she had dealt with what she ...”

“... ranges of survey data seeking the precise source of his magnetic attraction for the aggrieved white lower-middle and working classes. It will outlast the pundits holding forth on TV, collecting lecture fees and cranking out bestsellers that retail inside dope gleaned, single-sourced and second-hand, from somewhere near the elevators of Trump Tower. It ...”

“... in the windows in the hope that she’ll wake up and enliven a dull hour of their beat. Tonight a white car reverses dramatically up the street, screeches to a halt beside the van and a burly young man jumps out and gives the van a terrific shaking. Assuming (hoping, probably) he would have driven off by the time I get outside, I find he’s still there, and ...”

“... authorities than the force commander in Mogadishu – they came from Centcom HQ in Florida and the White House itself. The charge sheet for any inquiry into Mogadishu war crimes might contain the names of some very high-ranking American individuals. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) is roundly in favour of an International Criminal Court. But ...”

“... more eventful. Not only do I hardly drink and Rupert neither, but I don’t know anyone who does, Peter Cook about the only drunk I’ve ever known. In New York in the 1980s I used to like a screwdriver. Two was my limit, with three making me tipsy, which I found delightful. Had I been able to remain in that intermediate state I suppose I could have been a ...”

“... loop, dropped by a couple of times a month with news about the agent David Obst or the director Peter Bogdanovich, both dying to do Mallory. He drank bourbon, and when his glass was empty he held it high and rattled the ice cubes for a refill. He stayed until the bottle was empty and it was time to find another roost. He made nightly rounds of the city like ...”

“... him in America in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, which is more pungently caught in the oral biography Peter Manso produced in 1985, yet Lennon often puts his finger on the kind of detail that makes sense of Mailer’s character. Pearl Kazin (Alfred Kazin’s sister) was an editor at Harper’s Bazaar and her manner was said to be quite superior. She deployed it ...”

“... is a termagant with ‘a hard, mean face’, ‘a face that was like a child’s fist, small and white and clenched’. Clodia reminded me more than anything of Jessica Rabbit, as if always accompanied by the moans of bluesy saxophones: ‘With one of her wide-eyed sideways looks,’ she ‘asked in her breathy voice if there was anything – anything at all ...”