“... probably made her sense of guilt, after his premature death, no easier to bear, especially as she may have been half hoping he would die, believing that after a shortish interval she and Giddy would be married. But Giddy married someone else, and Anna was left with the duty and the penance of keeping her husband’s flame alive by ensuring that his ...”

“... scientism. If, for example, you understand perception and misperception scientifically, you may come to understand the bases of social injustice. If you learn to think like a scientist and investigate things for yourself, trusting no one, you will bypass the liars who misrepresent reality and find truth yourself. To be a good American citizen was to be ...”

“... that ‘liberalism has merely cleared a field in which every soul and every corporate interest may fight with every other for domination.’ Siedentop acknowledges this reality only in his assertion that ‘we are in a competition of beliefs’ with Chinese-style capitalism and Islam, which ‘offends some of our deepest intuitions’. This is ‘a strange ...”

“... in its legendary “purple dusk”’ – and the excitement of the visit as a whole – may well be the best part of the biography: ‘Merrill was released then into the sensory revelation that was Greece. For the first time, he heard nightingales sing and peacocks cry. He strolled in Athens’s “extraordinarily lovely” gardens: “Lemon and ...”

“... distorts the final volume’s picture of the age. Though American motives in the Roosevelt years may not have been golden, it is hard to accept them, as Vidal seems to wish us to, as entirely brazen, powered exclusively by imperial ambition. It ought to be possible to say this while also deploring illusions, myths and ...”

“... comic-pathetic idea of a man condemning himself while he thinks he is freeing himself. Don Quixote may be the grandest treatment of the comic illusion of freedom; Part One of Cervantes’s novel ends with Quixote beautifully defending the mission of knight-errancy: ‘I can say that ever since I became a knight-errant I have been ...”

“... which are followed by advice for curing sick cows. The anonymous compiler of this manuscript may have come home from a hard day at the cockpit to read how Homer’s fighting cocks kept themselves at the peak of fitness by eating ‘flesh of high hornd beeues, and drinking cups full crownd’, or about other mysterious Homeric dishes which always seem to ...”

“... affronted proportion and discretion. Into this world of affronted proportion and discretion, in May 1955, strode Joe Kennedy to arrange the wedding of his son the senator to Janet’s elder daughter. Although Janet and her husband wanted a quiet, discreet affair, the Kennedys viewed the wedding ‘as another political campaign to manage’. Janet moaned to ...”

“... creolised race’, ‘speakers of a hideous taal patois’ and so forth. Outbursts of this kind may properly be compared with his half-mad imprecations against the Germans during the First World War. ‘The idea begins to dawn upon the German mind that this is not a war of victories but a war of extermination for their race … There can only be ...”

“... of their reasons for tuning in that ‘so many other people listen to him and talk about it.’ It may be difficult to grasp now, but he provided the best – and most shocking – entertainment on air, mischievously telling his audience that all the nerve tonic adverts in the papers proved they were in a bad state, and that the British ‘Ministry of ...”

“... the first black man to break a barrier, he did not try to carry others along with him. He may have disappointed himself, too, over the decades, as he continued to insist his second novel was nearly done. Rampersad provides exhaustive details of what is portrayed as a flaw in Ellison’s psychology: his compulsive institution-joining, entering the ...”

“... from my groin and sellotaped it to the letter. “And these few pubic hairs, in the hope that they may make up for any inconvenience. Ever yours, Trudie Trumpeter.”’ When the Landaus complained about this, Rupert had his agent issue the following statement: ‘Rupert gets between five hundred and a thousand letters a week, and as you know some fans do ask ...”

“... that she was resting and practising her elocution with a view to a theatrical career. There may also have been a miscarriage or an abortion. With no private income, Lopokova had to keep on dancing for her supper or look to men for security. Lovers were played off against one another. She dumped her nice American fiancé, the journalist Heywood Broun, in ...”

“... By now, those not much acquainted with the 16th century or the concerns of European Christians may be wondering what all the fuss was about: this babble of words and definitions and excitement about holy images. Behind the Reformation lay the overriding concern of medieval Europe: salvation from eternal death and torment after the physical end of our brief ...”

“... DNA and restored to the bereaved. The blackened building, with its flayed grid and blind windows, may look like a ruin of war, but it also looms like a macabre charnel house chimney, a huge tomb of unidentified and unsolemnised dead. It stands like a stele, the ancient grave markers which were inscribed with the names of their occupants, often calling out to ...”