“... Not Grow Old’ (1945), an airman sees row on row of angelic aeroplanes flying into ‘a bright white light, shining bright and without any colour’ in a story that gives a gritty top-dressing of Hemingway to a wartime visionary mode that anticipates Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death by a couple of years.Dahl’s injuries led to ...”

“... his addiction to dihydrocodeine, an analgesic of which he took more than one hundred pills a day. William Burroughs described it as similar to heroin, twice as strong as codeine, but with a wired coke-like edge, so the North American doctors felt obliged to cure Göring of his dependency before allowing him to stand before the court.The phrasing makes it seem ...”

“... German-Jewish boyhood. ‘My Jew-boy’, Nixon was later to call him – at least once on the White House tapes – and it’s clear that many of Kissinger’s traits were acquired early on in Fürth. His family was one of those which did not identify with the opposition in Bavaria, preferring to stress its patriotic character, its past loyalty to the ...”

“... narrow eye Black-bottomed whitewear out of nowhere fast You see the azure through the muscatel The white opacities we hear as thunder The fact that each is an iambic pentameter disturbs their individual impact by turning them, in this listing, into a sort of joke stanza such as people have often made up by bringing together totally unrelated lines. It also ...”

“... Barring Vogel, the core members all got screen deals. They hesitated to invite the novelist William Gaddis because none of them could get through his mammoth novels. They relented, Friedman tells us in his memoir, Lucky Bruce, when Heller’s one-time agent, Candida Donadio, said not to worry – nobody read Gaddis’s novels. In the city, when they ...”

“... By luck, some Canadian missionaries active in a nearby town learned what had happened. They sent a white lawyer to defend the villagers and win their release. In gratitude, the villagers started to give up their old goddesses and accept baptism. They began sending their children to attend the schools set up by missionaries. Untouchables had long been ...”

“... what appeared to be ski pants. He had soft, unblemished skin, long, flowing hair and sparkling white teeth. Communicating telepathically, he explained that his name was Orthon, that he came from Venus, and that he was on Earth to warn mankind that the testing and use of atomic bombs was putting the entire galaxy in danger. ‘The beauty of his form ...”

“... and the House of Lords. The actual picture, Dr Alderman reveals, was much more complex: William Cobbett himself was fond of referring to the ‘blaspheming Jews’, Gladstone was a Whig and a great opponent of the Jews at one and the same time, while Disraeli was a Tory and the final Emancipation Act itself was a Conservative measure. How then, Dr ...”

“... there was. We owe the widespread belief that Robin lived in the time of Richard I (1157-1199) to William Stukeley (1687-1765), an eccentric scholar of ancient British history who fabricated for him a crazy family pedigree going back to the Normans. Knight argues that the search for the historical Robin is as quixotic as the search for the historical ...”

“... connections, Bute was decried as the new Highland adventurer. It did not help that another Scot, William Murray, Lord Mansfield, who was dogged by the smear that he was intent on importing Scots Romanist principles into the English common law, had become lord chief justice in 1756. Might Bute and his Scotch cronies find no better use for Magna Carta, English ...”

“... room is suddenly full of emphases: monochrome canvases (late 1950s, early 1960s) in which white is worked into black, wet on wet, so that the surface seems made up of choppy grey erasures. Out of this a black form emerges, uncertainly, because the lattice or matrix of brushstrokes is so uniform throughout. Nonetheless, there is a black floating ...”

“... ranges of survey data seeking the precise source of his magnetic attraction for the aggrieved white lower-middle and working classes. It will outlast the pundits holding forth on TV, collecting lecture fees and cranking out bestsellers that retail inside dope gleaned, single-sourced and second-hand, from somewhere near the elevators of Trump Tower. It ...”

“... tall, graceful buildings contain e.e. cummings, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams.Eliot cast the longest shadow on the mid-century generation, not simply because of the brilliance of the poetry and essays: he was both the model and the anti-model for the New Criticism (espoused by Lowell and Jarrell’s teachers John ...”

“... was over the name. I favoured (homage to Izaak Walton) the Lea spelling, where they went for the (William) Burroughs-suggestive Lee. Inspector Lee. Willie Lee. Customised paranoia: double e, narrowed eyes glinting behind heavy-rimmed spectacles. The area alongside the M25, between Enfield Lock and High Beach, Epping Forest, carries another echo of ...”

“... in the summer of 1814, in which Cochrane and Cockburn sailed up the Potomac, dined in the White House on the banquet that the fleeing President Madison had left behind, then burned the city’s public buildings. Fifty years later, while protesting neutrality, Britain effectively sided with the South in the Civil War. Is it any wonder that in 1914 the ...”