“... This, and other evidence of fighting at close quarters, is dispassionately surveyed by columns of young fighters, dressed in tattered clothing and packing the standard Kalashnikov. Mid-morning and sunset bring the routine sound of Ethiopian shelling. The smell of fried bread and peppers wafts through the narrow warren of ...”

“... to take a view that includes both. The 1780s were the years in which Burke’s crusade against Warren Hastings and the East India Company took shape – the occasion of so much of the ‘great melody’. After George III had destroyed the Fox-North ministry by rejecting Burke’s East India Bill, Burke must have seen the indictment of Hastings, of the ...”

“... both were working for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), predecessor of the CIA. Both were young, separated by the war from their wives, and loved intelligence work. Both met, liked and became friends with Kim Philby, who was then working for the SIS. When Angleton and Scott met him, Philby had been a penetration agent for the Russians for a decade. He ...”

“... birthday letter to Lay: ‘55 years old. Wow! That is really old. Thank goodness you have such a young, beautiful wife.’ Political links outside the US were also important, particularly in India, where Enron’s massively expensive Dabhol electricity generating plant, the first such privately owned project in the Subcontinent, was mired in controversy, and ...”

“... World War earned him a CBE. Both fathers were much loved, and both died suddenly at a relatively young age. Neither daughter received much in the way of formal education, but each took every available opportunity to educate herself. There the resemblances end. Warner’s stroke of luck was that her mother’s subsequent remarriage freed her to pursue an ...”

“... transformations. This account is both more accurate and more attractive, especially to young people of diverse backgrounds and media competencies who might be new to much of the work on display. (Such changes attest to the influence of an in-house think tank called Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives, or C-MAP. Rather than franchise ...”

“... journalism towards movie options, by way of song lyrics – ‘Rottweiler Blues’ – for Warren Zevon. He was never stuck in the paperback original ghetto, his mayhem justified by a care for indigenous wildlife and a surreal gift for disposing of unpleasant humans in inventive ways. But Gregory Corso is in danger of slipping quietly out of the ...”

“... the world.’ Reed became an immortal, and was buried under the Kremlin wall. Sixty years later, Warren Beatty impersonated him in the movie Reds. He was anything but a callow romantic. In 1917, Reed was already a socialist journalist who had covered revolutionary war in Mexico and had involved himself not only in writing about some of the most brutal ...”

“... to savour a thimble of blood tapped from the neck of a vicious goose tethered to a telephone pole; young Chinese gangsters in American suits beating up a shopkeeper; beggars fighting over their pitches; beautiful White Russian bar-girls smiling at passers-by’. It struck him as ‘a magical place, a self-generating fantasy that left my own little mind far ...”

“... in the 1930s by the photographer François Kollar, shooting in a desolate concrete chamber where young French children were learning to swim. An instructor in a suit looks on from the edge of the pool. Pale white arms push forward through the dark water or extend like luminous floats either side of bobbing heads. Flooding in the pits was one of the risks ...”

“... Shown as part of the arts series Monitor in 1962, it purported to follow a day in the life of four young artists: Boty, Peter Blake, Derek Boshier and Peter Phillips. For Mellor, growing up in ‘meagre’ circumstances in the East Midlands, London as the Sixties started to swing was a revelation, ‘a vision of something wonderful’. After she died Boty’s ...”

“... How much are the Poor to be pitied, & the Rich to be blamed!’ the young Jane Austen exclaimed in a marginal note to Oliver Goldsmith’s History of England. Mary Toft, the notorious 18th-century ‘rabbit breeder’, was undoubtedly very poor. But was she to be pitied? Contemporary accounts of her hoax identified her as ‘poor’ in ways that combined sympathy with contempt ...”

“... I know bitterly criticise the IRA, then suddenly, but it’s linked, he shifts to describing how a young IRA man was ambushed near an arms dump: ‘The whole town’ heard him pleading with the soldiers for mercy before he was shot.’ ‘Is that so?’ I say, a polite nothing that hides a confused mulch of attitudes – rule of law, Gibraltar, squaddies, seen ...”

“... as a reviewer was aimed at the vitals of his early Agrarian mentors: ‘To expect Tate’s and Warren’s poems to be most influenced by Ransom’s is like expecting two nightmares to be influenced by a daydream.’ To ‘get’ most of Jarrell’s reviewing jokes you had to be well in the know, and maybe this off-the-cuff allusiveness was one of the keys ...”

“... Brando (he asked to fuck her; she asked if he had got his teeth capped). She may have slept with Warren Beatty – ‘I guess I did. Probably once.’ She met the Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau at a London premiere and nearly married him after a whirlwind romance, though she says less about him than about his preferred midnight snack, ‘a glass of ...”