“... to know which peril to invoke, which would pay off best. In 1893 the prolific literary adventurer, William le Queux (sometime Honorary Consul for San Marino), published The Great War England in 1897, in which a Franco-Russian army invaded Britain, and followed it in 1905 with The Invasion of 1910, this time with jack-booted Prussians as the aggressors. This ...”

“... information about life at Winchester, where Empson’s companions included Richard Crossman, William Hayter, John Sparrow and other future grandees. It was, as he later remarked, ‘a ripping education’, a first-class ticket for life. The next stop was Cambridge, by means of a scholarship to Magdalene. At this optimum moment of intellectual purity he ...”

“... said, delimiting his talents), Willie seems to have inherited from his father, the surgeon Sir William Wilde, a shaky financial and moral sense (as did Oscar). There is a story, repeated by Sturgis, that Sir William, a serial adulterer who was accused of rape by one of his patients, handed Willie a letter he had ...”

“... She tells us how her brother was arrested several times, released, then finally sent in 1938 to a camp ‘without the right of correspondence’ – in other words, liquidated. After his first arrest, in 1919, the brother – by some legal oddity – could be visited only by her, because she was under ten. Why was he arrested? No reason. Perhaps because ...”

“... has a specific history in German Romanticism. It is a delusion which Peter Paret and especially William Vaughan are quite ready to take for reality, while Norman Stone’s own dreams about ‘the positive qualities of Hitler, his real achievements’ (thus Professor J.H. Plumb’s Introduction) aid and abet it: if Hitler was some sort of genius, he is part ...”

“... Here is a typical sentence: ‘The revived interest in the White House wiretaps also prompted William Sullivan, who was then in the midst of a power struggle with J. Edgar Hoover, to visit Robert Mardian, head of the Justice Department’s Internal Security Division, and warn him, as Mardian later testified, that Hoover could not be trusted and might try ...”

“... in the Eighties. Saunders’s account of Partisan and its editor, the insufferably pretentious William Phillips – in a chapter she calls ‘Cultural Nato’ – is devastating. Far from being independent, PR was on the CIA payroll via front organisations like the Farfield Foundation. Before that, it had been carried financially by none other than Henry ...”

“... as the war starts’ (September 1937); ‘We might as well pack our bags for the concentration camp’ (March 1938); ‘the concentration camp looms ahead’ (November 1938). And there is the fearful vision of Coming Up for Air (June 1939): ‘The bombs, the food-queues, the rubber truncheons, the barbed wire, the ...”

“... Murder Mystery) Awake in Spain is a hotchpotch of shepherds, Audenesque pastoral airmen, urban gay camp, Shakespearean aristocrats-in-the-woods and what William Empson called the child-as-swain: TWO SHEPHERDS: We love the country, that’s why we’re handsome, it’s love love love love love. We only quarrel over ...”

“... I remember hearing it when I was in Beirut in 2002, during Israel’s assault on the Jenin refugee camp, and thinking, no, it’s a ruthless, pitiless siege. The use of the word ‘genocide’ struck me then as typical of the rhetorical inflation of Middle East political debate, and as a symptom of the bitter, ugly competition over victimhood in ...”

“... This is From Early Life by the oldest of the five authors, the novelist and scientist ‘William Cooper’: he was born in 1910 and brought up (as Harry Hoff) in the town of Crewe in Cheshire. Seniors in his family were determined chapel-goers, but Cooper-Hoff looks back at his childhood, over eighty years, with the quiet smile of a tolerant ...”

“... When Toho Studios released Gojira in November 1954, Japanese audiences, according to William Tsutsui, watched its scenes of destruction ‘in respectful silence, sometimes leaving the theatres in tears’. Gojira – or Godzilla, as he came to be known in English – was a fire-breathing dinosaur played by a man in a latex suit, but his destruction of Tokyo wasn’t played for laughs ...”

“... In​ 1917, the United States Coal and Coke Company established a mining camp named after the company president, Thomas Lynch, just north of the Cumberland Gap in eastern Kentucky, at the foot of Black Mountain, the highest peak in the state. By the start of the Second World War, more than ten thousand people were living in Lynch, and the mines, which employed four thousand, were among the most productive in the world ...”

“... Biography there are photographs of David Niven, Diana Dors, Eric Morecambe, John Betjeman and William Walton. Dors has a leering ‘Come up and read me sometime’ expression on her face and Niven wears his yacht-club greeter’s smile. Morecambe seems to be laughing at one of his own jokes. Amiable images, devised no doubt to lure us into a placidly ...”

“... values on the Chiltern slopes. The Rothschild estate of Halton was ‘transformed into a vast camp of hutments, which played sad havoc with the beauty of the hillside towards Tring, and this has developed into one of the principal depots of the Royal Air Force.’ Not far away, Hillingdon House became the headquarters of the RAF, Inland Area. Perhaps we ...”