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“... was that woman. She dressed for court in a blue serge dress with a long grey cloak over it and a white chrysanthemum pinned to her breast. ‘She was the perfect witness,’ Humphreys wrote. ‘Neat and tidy in her appearance, polite and respectful in her answers, with just that twinge of feeling to be expected in a person who knows herself to be the victim ...”

“... wing of the CIA; J.C. King, chief of the clandestine wing’s Western Hemisphere Division; and William Hood, at that time chief of operations under King. Roman said she didn’t know why the 10 October cable made no mention of the FBI reports, but guessed (in Morley’s words) they ‘may have been circulating in other CIA offices and been unavailable to ...”

“... it is appropriate to cite the reaction of Mr Morel in Sons and Lovers after the death of his son William; it may even be authentically Arthur Lawrence’s.’ But what if Mr Morel’s reactions were not ‘authentically Arthur Lawrence’s’? – and there is no particular reason why they should be. Unlike some biographers, Worthen has at least been ...”

“... by a dose of old-fashioned condescension. He once did what he thought was a scorching job on William Whitelaw, but chanced to run across him shortly after in White’s Club. The columnist confesses to being horrified. Presumably he would never attack a man he knew he was lunching with next week. But Whitelaw soon has ...”

“... dissent makes a serviceable fit, here, with the popular anti-imperialism of Mark Twain, who with William James and others had organised the ‘Moratorium’ protest against America’s bullying conquest of the Philippine Islands in 1898. Twain detested the process by which America was being turned from a democratic republic, however corrupt and crude, into a ...”

“... the Falklands crisis of 1982. Then, he was propelled into a central role in dealing with the White House and the US media. As we now know, much more was offered by way of American support than appeared at the time. Henry Kissinger’s Diplomacy is a very different kind of book, a study of two hundred years of international politics and of attempts to ...”

“... an Ethiopian conscript, its fingernails perfectly preserved, gropes at the sky from a forearm of white bone obscured at the elbow by khaki rags and tall, thin grass. 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 ...”

“... changes that had come over the Royal Navy in the interval. In Nelson’s time it was possible for William Mitchell, a young seaman, to be flogged round the fleet, to survive it, to pass for lieutenant when he was about thirty, and to reach Nelson’s own rank of vice-admiral of the white in 1814. Yet even before 1814 ...”

“... a tender friendship with another man, but supports the killing of a decadent German officer with white hands, effeminate clothes and the picture of a pale, blue-eyed young man round his neck. Not homosexuality but spiritual androgyny is the right thing, clearly – she had called Oscar Wilde’s habits ‘infamy’ – and the same preference is apparent in ...”

“... areas should be attached to museums, where the categories of objects the museum contains (‘white man’s art’ and so on), the ‘jobs and personalities’ of their donors and the curricula vitae of the staff will be spelt out to the visitor. Key works should be isolated in rooms with tiered seating. He is indignant because, in labels ...”

“... his is more of a social analysis than Sheppard’s, as regards present-day London at least. If William Morris found Londoners a century ago ‘joyless, hopeless, shameless, angerless, set in their stare’, Hebbert now finds the opposite, and can back his sentiment with statistics. Illuminating on sport (East London has 37 golf courses against West ...”

“... by bedding heiresses. No slavemaster had a higher scorn for aristocrats than the promiscuous Sir William Beckford, the exceedingly rich Lord Mayor of London who complained to Horace Walpole that the air of Richmond was so bad that 12 of his natural children had died there; to which one can only add that they would have died faster in the West Indies. East of ...”

“... he was a journalist. He hated American capitalism and imperialism, and yet perversely worked for William Randolph Hearst, who owned over a million acres of ranchland in Chihuahua and instructed his editors that he didn’t want Diaz touched with so much as a rose petal in his publications. None of Bierce’s fiction did well, and his publishers all went ...”

“... drink the urine of reindeer that had browsed on the mushroom. Our own Father Christmas – red and white like amanita, and borne aloft by tipsy reindeer – may be a tortuous folk-memory of this cult. According to the philologist John Allegro, if I remember his drift correctly, Jesus Christ was also a mushroom. More recently, the witches of Medieval Europe ...”

“... the author follows the glow in the dark across the work of several novelists – Remarque, Mailer, William Styron, Hemingway – confirms this. ‘I have noted all the cigarettes that are crushed out, thrown away or unlit at night, shared and hoarded, detested and loved – instruments of torture and surgery, tokens of friendship and signs of love – in ...”