“... felt that they alone endured a calvary of pain when their bellicose compatriots handed out white feathers or sang jingo songs; in the Second World War, however, ordinary citizens often faced death by bombing at a time when many soldiers were still tucked up in rural training camps, far from harm’s way. As the line between civilian and combatant ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 sky in Bulatov’s large canvases (‘Glory to the CPSU!’), or the rows upon rows of white rectangles that comprise Komar and Melamid’s ‘Quotation’, where we don’t even need to see the words to recognise a deadened formula. Sorokin’s early texts were displayed at Conceptualist exhibitions and circulated among friends in the form of ...”

“... couldn’t help but look after the weak. Well, not much wrong with such a notion in the black and white, troubled world of the 1940s and 1950s (or even the present one, just for a bit of a rest). After the war, in books but most of all in old movies, these reluctant action heroes became perfect modern exemplars for the likes of Camus, who saw in them a stoic ...”

“... don’t like feeling that they are being teased. When Shostakovich repeatedly quotes Rossini’s William Tell Overture in the first movement of the Fifteenth Symphony, is this to be understood as a motif for freedom, as some commentators have speculated? A hint that Shostakovich, like Rossini, had ‘lived slightly too long’, as he suggested in a letter to ...”