“... and San Francisco, conducting drug experiments on unknowing subjects in brothels or at parties he held in CIA safehouses. In his diary, White wrote frankly about the corruption, drugs, sex and violence in which he happily participated: ‘Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, cheat, rape and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the All ...”

“... counties. Outside, eight hundred coffin-like replicas of the columns lie on the ground as if they held the remains of victims of a natural disaster or terror attack. They are waiting to be claimed by counties throughout the South and returned to them as memorials. Like other gatherings of names – the Vietnam Memorial, Yad Vashem, the Menin Gate and the ...”

“... perhaps, on issues remote from the reading public’s own experience: they cannot alter strongly-held opinions formed in work-places, pubs, homes and in such places as the City. (The British pub is arguably more influential than the press in forming opinion on domestic policies.) Even the heavily-controlled press of Communist or other single-party countries ...”

“... harder from the south-south-west, taking the Armada clear of the Flemish Banks. Medina Sidonia held a council of war and it was decided that weather permitting they should return to Calais. Weather did not permit: the strong south-west winds, with a heavy sea, continued day after day. Effingham also held a council, and ...”

“... through all her work of the horror of human intimacy, of touch (‘a collection of bones loosely held together by a stained glove mottled skin’); the sounds and smells of those who invade private space. Theo Faron, the disengaged Oxford don with his ‘empty inviolate house’, reprises Kate Miskin whose great fear, in A Taste for Death, is that her ...”

“... it could have got a flavour of either iron or leather. Nevertheless, these two great wine-tasters held to what they had said. Time went by, the wine was sold, and when they came to clean out the cask, they found in it a small key hanging to a thong of leather; see now if one who comes of the same stock has not a right to give his opinion in such like ...”

“... Ellison like to make lists of the amazing prodigies that flowed to him from his single novel. David Remnick, writing in the New Yorker in 1994, noted the ‘National Book Award, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et Lettres, a place in the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a position at New York University as ...”

“... System cost $110,000; and when the NIH baulked at the expense, Venter dipped into a grant he still held from the Pentagon to finance its purchase. The machine arrived at the NINDS laboratory in 1987, and Venter remembers thinking: ‘This was my future in a crate.’ The relationship between machine and user wasn’t passive – Venter had to do a lot to get ...”

“... racial preoccupations. But no one has yet given Bunche the kind of magisterial treatment David Levering Lewis gave Du Bois. In his new book, Kal Raustiala, who concentrates on Bunche’s work at the UN, admits that he hasn’t done it either. (Writing this essay, I have drawn on all three biographies and on Henry’s edition of Bunche’s ...”

“... During the break-up with Kimberly Quinn that precipitated his break-up with the Home Office, David Blunkett is reported to have warned her: ‘The law is on my side. I know because I made the law.’ It doesn’t quite have the melodramatic chill of Judge Dredd’s ‘I am the law,’ but it comes close. And it’s easy to imagine Blunkett saying it, for it nicely sums up the tragically self-important view he took of himself, and of the executive branch of government, during his time in office ...”

“... of the latter, as you know, and he thought it was very good but he finally decided to acquire from David Godine, the American publisher who holds the copyright to both current translations, their version of The Prospector … Ravi knows Sue Berger (who worked for Godine) well, because they used to be colleagues in London when both were working for Penguin and ...”

“... Rogers, Ingrid Bergman and Mary Pickford joined a committee to welcome her to Hollywood, where David O. Selznick sponsored an evening in her honour during which the Los Angeles Philharmonic played ‘The Madame Chiang Kai-shek March’. (As she was travelling west, the inhabitants of one small town lined up to see her when her train stopped to take on ...”

“... in Assad’s inner circle feared that Syria would be next). According to Assad’s biographer David Lesch, ‘Damascus wanted the Bush doctrine to fail, and it hoped that Iraq would be the first and last time it was applied. Anything it could do to ensure this outcome, short of incurring the direct military wrath of the United States, was considered fair ...”

“... The Holy Roman Empire and its elaborate judicial, administrative and electoral institutions held things together only in a limited sense, as a display of the many different coins issued by individual German states shows. The Great Nef, a mechanical galleon made around 1585 by Hans Schlottheim, was intended to symbolise the empire’s harmonious ...”

“... had their metadata, including origin and destination numbers, logged by the NSA and continue to be held for government review by the phone companies. There are also the lists that the US government keeps of people whom it deems to be worth watching. The best known is the No Fly List, which contains tens of thousands of names. The more obscure Terrorist ...”