“... hear that the line ‘Free me, Lord, from evil folk’ (140) is best spoken in the voice of George Bush. Inversion, the possessive, the unpronounceable and an unfortunate word-choice all converge in Psalm 18, where he transforms a dull line in the King James (‘As soon as they hear of me, they shall obey me: the strangers shall submit themselves unto ...”

“... for tax evasion his most energetic defenders were Senator Orrin Hatch (Utah) and Congressman George Hansen (Idaho), both Mormons. Jerry Falwell, the Moral Majority leader, joined in the Moonie chorus that Moon’s imprisonment was a violation of religious liberty. Congressmen and Senators were bombarded with offers of free hospitality at the Washington ...”

“... gaiety.Buñuel likes some contemporary directors, but not many. American films, he says. Woody Allen. Stanley Kubrick. ‘That film with those shots of the man’s eye.’ ‘A Clockwork Orange?’ ‘That’s the one.’ Nice thought, coming from the man whose film career began with the image of an eye slashed by a razor. Buñuel tells me a Hitchcock ...”

“... happened to be our local MP in East Dundee. The gap between him and radical socialists like George Galloway, then cutting his teeth in the bear pit of the Dundee Labour Party, was great, but seemed neither so great nor so significant as the gap between both of them and Margaret Thatcher’s Tories, who came to power after Wilson withdrew his party’s ...”

“... was signed in October 1994. The Republican Right railed against this for the next six years, until George W. Bush brought a host of the Agreement’s critics into his Administration, and they set about dismantling it, thus fulfilling their own prophecy and initiating another dangerous confrontation with Pyongyang. The same folks who brought us the invasion of ...”

“... how much Thomas Carlyle took from German literature and philosophy; how important Goethe was for George Eliot; how much Matthew Arnold admired German education. It is also telling how compatible a veneration for Kultur was with the Victorian values of service and civic engagement. (The big difference is that the great and good of Breslau in the 19th and ...”

“... and primary function of all intelligence agencies – to ‘covert action’. By the end of Allen Dulles’s term as DCI (1953-61), the ascendancy of covert action over intelligence analysis was so great that the CIA’s own analysts were not consulted in planning the invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs. Since Watergate, the emphasis has shifted firmly ...”

“... couple were denied seats on the plane that would have taken them across the Atlantic to safety? George Kates, an IDC agent working in China, reflected later in the war that ‘much of this general plan for omnivorous and utopian book gathering … is on paper, and has no great bearing on the winning of the war.’As the conflict moved back into Europe, the ...”

“... they opened up. A whole gallery of male heroes was assembled from decades past: Michael Caine, George Best, Keith Moon, Steve McQueen. Some of them I’d barely heard of and some were dead (or very nearly), but I was left in no doubt that a proper lad would be a fan of these geezers. Undoubtedly Loaded – along with Arena, Esquire, GQ, FHM, Maxim (to name ...”

“... to the Duke of Kent, the Grand Master of the Most Distinguished Order of St Michael and St George, that Philby be made a Companion of the Order. This was usually conferred upon British subjects as a reward for services abroad and often went to members of the foreign service. The Russians took such matters as honours and medals almost as seriously as ...”

“... his enormous posthumous Collected won America’s National Book Award for 1971; its editor, Donald Allen, has since brought out a Selected and several more volumes of prose and verse. During the 1950s, O’Hara reviewed art and contemporary classical music. He wrote at least seven poems called ‘On Rachmaninoff’s Birthday’, and many others in which music ...”

“... of mental imbalance and upset which became so fashionable in the 1720s and 1730s, and which George Cheyne christened ‘the English malady’. For sufferer as for healer, an organic condition was a real condition, not a mere maladie imaginaire. Moreover, as long as, ‘ “superstitious” causes and “magical” cures still had their popular ...”

“... Christopher Cox, Robert Ferro, Michael Grumley, Andrew Holleran, Felice Picano, Edmund White and George Whitmore, together with the film critic Vito Russo and the editor and academic George Stambolian – began producing books whose examination of gay life, though often programmatic, was still infused with the raw ...”

“... now:/a faintest glimmer I am going to get out/somehow alive from this’); a sequence called ‘To Allen Tate’ quotes from a letter by Tate; ‘Publication Day’ is a letter from Marcia Nardi rewritten as a sonnet.Hardwick felt a certain schadenfreude that the poems were, in her opinion, so bad. ‘It seemed so sad that the work was, certainly in that part ...”

“... two Corinne Day photographs (one of Kate again) and some earlier monochrome prints, including George Hoyningen-Huene’s 1930 Modern Mariners Put out to Sea, of two androgynous swimmers on a diving board, the old Penguin Classics cover for The Great Gatsby. The far end of this group is presided over by Alexander McQueen, in a huge image blown up to fill a ...”