“... The only parts that entirely escape his engagement are those ‘historical’ sections (the Adams cantos, the Chinese cantos, and so forth) which seem to him not otherwise translated into ‘poetry’ by their beauty of style. The problems raised by Carpenter’s biography are more sharply focused by Casillo’s work. The difference comes from ...”

“... The British press did not bother much about the country either, and British academics (apart from James Dunkerley) have, for the most part, steered clear; it was an expensive and dangerous place to send your research students to. For the Americans, however, Guatemala has long been the most significant country in Central America – far more so than Nicaragua ...”

“... Eliot and Pound were both bricoleurs, but they were purposeful: the great chunks of Jefferson and Adams and Confucius that find their way into The Cantos illustrate Pound’s version of history, and are intended to show how the chaos of the present might be redeemed if we could only be led to make sense – his sense, that is – of the past. But not all ...”

“... Henry A. Wise, a Southern member of Congress and a future Confederate general, called John Quincy Adams ‘the acutest, the astutest, the archest enemy of Southern slavery that ever existed’. Adams would have subscribed to the view that ‘all men are created equal’ – but, as ...”

“... club, Summertown Stars, and sent me to the local Church of England school, St Philip and St James. I was already a competitive, sport-obsessed child, and responded to the sense of cultural difference by exaggerating it. During a classroom discussion – I can’t remember about what exactly – I quoted the great Green Bay Packers football coach, Vince ...”

“... to pursue new development in the area. Her response made me think of what the risk expert John Adams calls ‘risk compensation’, the idea that in an environment that’s been made safer for us, we naturally increase our risk-taking up to the point where we restore our level of riskiness to what we were comfortable with before the safety measures were ...”

“... office, President Clinton was more parsimonious in granting pardons than any president since John Adams two hundred years earlier. But he made up for this at the end when he cast aside the ordinary process for handling federal clemency applications and, in the words of the American lawyer Margaret Colgate, ‘enjoyed a final unencumbered opportunity to reward ...”

“... words’. Freelancing at the New Yorker, she did her best to shock Ross, who, according to James Thurber, had ‘an editorial phobia’ about ‘bathroom and bedroom’ stuff. ‘We damn near printed a newsbreak about a girl falling off the roof,’ Ross once confided to Thurber. ‘That’s feminine hygiene, somebody told me just in time.’ (On ...”

“... of Norman Whitfield, and the social significance and songwriting talent of John Lennon rather than James Brown – persists. Clearly, too, most rock writing foregrounds lyrics, whereas most dance music works through texture, beats and effects. Back in 1976, punk set itself against disco wholeheartedly. Alan Jones and Jussi Kantonen describe an occasion in July ...”

“... he had joined a group of men who regularly met up to get drunk and have sex with a horse owned by James Michael Tait, a truck driver. Tait’s horse was apparently not in the mood, so the men wandered naked onto a neighbouring farm, where they were anally penetrated, each in turn, by a stallion they had nicknamed Big Dick, actual name Strut. The stallion ...”

“... non-linear-dynamical point of view. It’s a funny book, Time Bandits crossed with Douglas Adams. It’s an enormous, systematic study of order and disorder, which moves to the strange, slow rhythms of what historians call the longue durée. Although the bulk of its action seems to happen in North America, it is also about 18th-century England, and ...”

“... turned out to be an abortive attempt to raise an 11-ton section of the hull. The movie director James Cameron, fascinated with what he called the Everest of wrecks, filmed a dive that became part of his blockbuster 1997 movie (the footage was recently repurposed for a documentary). The new 3D version of the movie released in time for the centenary took its ...”

“... the outstanding individual, someone whose outsize talent can carry the weaker players. When LeBron James moves from city to city, the teams he plays for rise and fall with him. Obama was so much more talented than anyone else around – so smart, so eloquent, so cool under pressure – that his teammates must have hoped he could do the same for them. Golf is ...”

“... if not hyperventilate, at some of the A-list names cropping up regularly in All We Know: Maude Adams (the first Peter Pan); the Russian film star Alla Nazimova (a teetering Salomé in the ultra-campy cinematic 1923 version of Wilde’s play); Isadora Duncan, the bisexual modern dancer; the interior decorator Elsie de Wolfe and her Broadway-producer lover ...”

“... as Labour’s relatively new shadow home secretary, he gave a speech in response to the murder of James Bulger that brought him to national prominence, and served as a kind of template for his response to 9/11. The Bulger murder, Blair believed, in its depravity and its horror, served to make the connection between other, lesser crimes that might otherwise go ...”