“... in the garden, Kekulé alone in his dreams, Galileo unappreciated and persecuted. Never mind that Paul Rabinow’s fine book Making PCR makes a persuasive case that many people at the Cetus Corporation in Emeryville, California, where Mullis then worked, had a hand in it, and that the discovery of PCR might be more plausibly referred to a corporate ethos (and ...”

“... of the National Nuclear Security Administration from May 2003 to January 2007, told Rhodes that Paul Wolfowitz, then the deputy secretary for defense, had once explained to him why no one in the administration was interested in arms control. He said it was because arms control was the sort of thing you can’t get when it would help, and when you can get ...”

“... Hollywood began to release more demurely anti-fascist fare. This caused political uproar. Joseph Kennedy, the US ambassador to Britain and a former movie executive, warned some of his former colleagues that Jews would be held accountable if America entered the war. The Senate hearings on Moving Picture Screen and Radio Propaganda in 1941 began by suggesting ...”

“... about keeping its plans secret from Washington. Some Americans, including Senator John F. Kennedy, already supported Algerian independence. Oil and gas had been found in Algeria, and French intelligence had discovered that American oil companies were in correspondence with an FLN leader, Ahmed Ben Bella, about possible oil leases. This was more than ...”

“... and recent appointments to the Supreme Court – this coffee house is adjacent to Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and across the Charles River from the Business School. I did not take part in a political cabal, or think that one was being plotted around me, unless the normal conversation of Harvard elites counts as such. It did not occur to me ...”

“... testimonial – which was in fact written by McGeorge Bundy, later national security adviser to Kennedy and Johnson, with input and edits from a number of senior officials intimately involved with the Manhattan Project – was an authoritative counterattack, and it was entirely successful. The message that the bomb had saved a million American lives, in the ...”

“... stage until Monday morning; most of the crowd had already left. With Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy assassinated, Nixon in the White House, the Salt I treaty still a few years off and nearly half a million troops in Vietnam, three of those memorable turns were in ‘protest’ mode: Havens’s sampling of the 19th-century spiritual ‘Motherless ...”

“... that are undimmed in this final volume. There are other works on the same theme, for example, Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery (1976) and Ben Wilson’s lively Empire of the Deep: The Rise and Fall of the British Navy (2013), but these shorter works concentrate on high power politics rather than the inner workings of the ...”

“... Galvano Della Volpe for his ‘impenetrable syntax and circular self-reference’, Jean-Paul Sartre for his ‘hermetic and unrelenting maze of neologisms’ and Louis Althusser for his ‘sibylline rhetoric of elusion’. The good cop, bad cop alternation is not a trick or a tactic, it manifests a fundamental tension between Anderson’s humane ...”

“... is proud to report a sartorial victory for his class during an exchange of words with Jacqueline Kennedy in the hall of the spectacularly grand Manhattan apartment to which she moved after her husband’s assassination. They had become friendly in the course of earlier meetings, once at a state dinner in the White House and another time, while she was still ...”

“... music. One of these venues – on the rue Huchette – called itself La Discothèque. Then Paul Pacine opened the Whiskey a Go-Go, where dancers would hit the floor accompanied by records played by disc jockeys on a phonograph. Pacine went on to open other clubs in Europe, while in Paris Chez Régine opened in 1960, catering to the self-styled ...”

“... juice. When we sat down he said something nice about a book of mine. It was a trick he got from Kennedy: always praise the book by an author that other people find difficult. ‘I’ll never win the Nobel Prize, you know,’ he said. ‘Why are you so sure?’ ‘Because I stabbed my wife.’ ‘Oh.’ ‘No, they won’t give it to me.’ He wanted to talk ...”

“... administered a spanking. (For all I know, this is one of the many triggers that may have set Paul Johnson off.)Tariq Ali was the moving spirit of that rally and this book – which includes the spanking picture – brings it all back with exquisite vividness. It’s hard to recall what a hate-figure he was in those days. I had a friend, a moustachioed ...”

“... story. McQueen didn’t enjoy his success much. He was ill-humouredly envious of other actors – Paul Newman, an early rival, was christened ‘Fuckwit’ – and, in the 1960s at least, combative with almost everyone who worked on a film with him. When Richard Attenborough asked James Coburn why McQueen was so rude to him and all the other British actors on ...”

“... alone in silence in her bath; the young priest, sitting alone on his single bed, playing a Peter, Paul and Mary song on his nylon-stringed guitar; and finally Don in the office kitchen, alone in a patch of light that recedes as the camera pulls back into the darkness of the deserted typing pool. In one arena the chauvinism of the era is played out with zeal ...”