“... Eisenhower (although he had refused, against his advisers’ counsel, to come to the aid of the French at Dien Bien Phu) or forward onto Johnson (although ‘Johnson’s war’ was enlarged and prosecuted by Kennedy appointees claiming to represent the late President’s will, and Bobby himself did not go over to the Peace side until 1966). In any case, it ...”

“... of the same Eighties vintage: Atari and Nintendo video games, Airfix models, Tintin and Asterix, David Attenborough’s Life on Earth, Warner Brothers cartoons, The Waltons and The A-Team, the film Zombie Flesh-Eaters. The novel begins in Bangkok’s backpackers’ quarter, the Khao San Road, ‘a decompression chamber for those about to leave or enter ...”

“... wearied journalist wanted time to do justice to his subject. He’d been binging on a raft of French stuff (Lacan, Barthes, Derrida) because he couldn’t find anything of interest in contemporary English letters. He had a savagely allergic reaction to the productions of the Norwich School, Malcolm Bradbury’s over-eager cadets who were then consummating ...”

“... gentleman who inherited the income which supported his scholarship in 1776, lived through the French Revolution and shared all his friend Burke’s worst fears about the direction world affairs seemed to have taken in those years, Malone was naturally inclined to feel rather paranoid in the climate of the mid-1790s. His Introduction to the Inquiry makes ...”

“... the footstool and candelabra in the unfinished portrait of Madame Récamier when he was a pupil in David’s studio). The objects represented here can be traced from old inventories; indeed, an academic study exists devoted solely to Ingres’s eloquent mantelpieces. He shows not the slightest hint of embarrassment about the material expression of power ...”

“... history. Rosalind’s father, a much anthologised poet called John Grammaticus, has left his French château and come to London to be filmed for a documentary. Daisy is coming to town too, with proofs of her book, My Saucy Bark. Perowne hopes to engineer a truce between his daughter and his father-in-law, who cantankerously poured cold water on her first ...”

“... on existentialism and phenomenology edited by R.D. Laing, complete with a eulogistic preface by David Cooper (the South African-born psychiatrist who coined the term ‘anti-psychiatry’). But readers who have to rely on an English translation have had to wait almost four decades to get their hands on a complete version. In important respects the new ...”

“... Free State, and derided both then and since for his famous but embarrassingly arch greeting to David Livingstone when he ‘found’ him in Ujiji in November 1871 – ‘Dr Livingstone, I presume?’ – as well as for his silly ‘Stanley cap’ (like a chamberpot with holes and a tea-towel flapping at the sides), he has always been every historian’s ...”

“... have been explained diplomatically, as the Henrician regime sought to counter the danger of a French-Imperial alliance by negotiating with the German Lutheran princes; and politically, as reformers and conservatives jostled for control of the king’s mind and conscience, Cranmer and Cromwell versus Bishop Stephen Gardiner and the Duke of Norfolk. Bernard ...”

“... Coetzee: Beckett and Celan. This is how we learn of ‘the distinctive prose that Beckett, using French models in the main, though with Jonathan Swift whispering ghostly in his ear, was in the process of perfecting for himself, lyrical and mordant in equal measures’. And are told that Celan’s poem ‘Death Fugue’makes two huge implicit claims about ...”

“... the people’, and in his acerbic book The Best and the Brightest, published a decade later, David Halberstam described it as ‘a real whizbang day. There were ambushes, counter-ambushes and demonstrations in snake-meat eating, all topped off by a Buck Rogers show: a soldier with a rocket on his back who flew over water to land on the other side.’In ...”

“... and in groups, sectioned and whole; pie à la mode; ice cream sundaes in groups … hamburger and French fries; hamburger singly … lollipops in various groups.’ The groups are more of the same: each item is alone of its kind but contains multitudes. They seem related to Saul Steinberg’s contemporary line-ups or mugshots of American ...”

“... Menachem Begin as Israel’s prime minister. Begin, who had organised the 1946 bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in which 91 people were killed, was the first of the frank exponents of Jewish supremacism who continue to rule Israel. He was also the first routinely to invoke Hitler and the Holocaust and the Bible while assaulting Arabs and building ...”

“... no sustained narratives of disease. Autobiographies in the shadow of death were rare and brief. In David Hume’s six-page-long account of his life there are four sentences about his impending end: ‘I was struck with a disorder in my bowels which at first gave me no alarm, but has since, as I apprehend it, become mortal and incurable. I now reckon upon a ...”

“... mentioned by Nicholas Rowe in 1709) adds force. The book opens with a brisk pair of essays by David Fallow and Michael Wood on the subject of his parents: John Shakespeare, born in about 1530, the son of a tenant farmer in the outlying village of Snitterfield, and Mary née Arden, some years younger, of a more prosperous family from Wilmcote. Neither of ...”