“... 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 ...”

“... cases no one else would touch in the face of harassment and death threats from his fellow white Topekans. Post-Gage Park, when the Phelpses became America’s ‘most hated family’, there were accusations that he had only been doing it for the money, but his work was publicly recognised and acclaimed by the NAACP.Megan reports all this but seems at ...”

“... extensive breakwaters around the port’s deepest harbours. Out here vast loading cranes loom and white blisters of oil depots flank refineries operated by Shell, ExxonMobil, Koch, Gunvor and BP. The depots are owned by companies with acronyms for names, cloaking their part ownership by global oil giants: Aramco, Vitol and Kuwait Petroleum International (also ...”

“... wasn’t unprecedented: Lincoln presented the arguments of the Whig presidential candidate William Henry Harrison in the 1836 presidential campaign.) In a 1948 primary campaign, Harold Stassen and Thomas Dewey debated the outlawing of the American Communist Party on national radio. The idea of a televised presidential debate was proposed in 1959 by ...”

“... gateLovely aerial beetles of wonderful scintillateStrangest interest, and puffs of soft purest white –Soaking light, dispersing colouring for fancy’s delight.Of Maconachie, Paxton, Tickler, and Gloucester’s Stephens;Fray Bentos, Spiller and Baker, odds and evensOf trench foodKate Kennedy thinks he was equally talented in words and music: ‘The only ...”

“... Ulysses – and the magazine continued to come out, albeit with diminishing frequency, until 1969. William Burroughs, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Ed Dorn and Barbara Guest all appeared in its pages. Producing the Floating Bear was an ‘endless rhythm of editing, typing, proofing, printing, collating, stapling, labelling and mailing’, but di Prima ...”

“... what happened at Guernica to ‘Red hordes’, and as late as the 1970s a contributor to William Buckley’s National Review was still making the accusation.) Pointing the finger at Red militiamen also neatly avoided the question of German involvement. Steer had plenty of first-hand evidence of the Condor Legion’s presence in Spain: he had himself ...”

“... if helpfully complaisant, philanderer. Among other men she was attracted to, the novelist William Gerhardie proved to have sadistic tendencies which she didn’t enjoy, while the theatre and film director Tony Richardson was so nervous of her that when lodging with the Smiths in St John’s Wood he hardly dared to take a bath. Manning’s generally ...”

“... Conan Doyle’s own roll-calls of the SPR’s most droppable names (Alfred Russel Wallace and William James belonged, and Freud was a corresponding member), Daniel Stashower doesn’t discuss the wider impact of the spiritualist subcultures that emerged in the wake of the war that cost Conan Doyle a son and a brother. Like other recent biographies, this ...”

“... of lame ducks. Sandy, his schizophrenic nephew; Patsy Healey, who had acted in his short film The White Bus and been depressed ever since. There was his mother and, for a while, his brother’s wife, and he was always on call to counsel and very often to subsidise needy friends and actors who had lost their way. I have had some credit because I gave room in ...”

“... become human. Mothers’ and babies’ calculations of love reflect the law proposed by the late William Hamilton, a creative genius of sociobiology. (Hamilton died this year of malaria contracted in the Congo, where he was pursuing his latest ideas on the transmission of disease between species – arguably a martyr to his own passion for truth.) Hamilton ...”

“... can see why Rubens might have been jealous. The old man’s skin, his slightly rheumy eye and the white hair of his beard are wonderfully realised. Rubens tends to make use of a repertoire of effective conventions (the marks for an eyelid, folds in the skin, cheeks and so on) and unites them in a springy dance of brushstrokes. Van Dyck observes finer ...”