“... Feynman soon joined the emigration of the best and brightest physicists to General Groves’s boot camp at Los Alamos. His chief duty there was to run the computer division at a time before computers were available. His tools were a roomful of Babbage-style mechanical calculators, later supplemented with primitive punched-card machines. As a principal ...”

“... William Joyce, ‘Lord Haw-Haw’, recorded his last ever broadcast from the temporary offices of the German Radio Corporation, in Hamburg, on the day Hitler shot himself. British troops were on the point of entering the city and Joyce and his colleagues had raided the cellars of the Funkhaus, drinking everything they could find ...”

“... by a Chinese madame whose Thai girls used to serve UN troops in East Timor. Kabul is a city of camp followers, contractors and restaurateurs, who live off foreign armies and government spending programmes. Another hint of vitality is the traffic. Cars, carts, trucks and yellow and white Corolla taxis swarm past bearded old men on three-speed bicycles. They ...”

“... a Friday. Salinger and an army buddy, Paul Fitzgerald, were side by side when they entered the camp and were confronted by row upon row of emaciated bodies naked or in rags, some stacked like cordwood six or eight feet high. For their book Shields and Salerno gathered many witness accounts and photographs of events at Kaufering IV. One of them shows Johann ...”

“... contempt for anyone – including himself at a moment of weakness during a ‘selection’ in the camp when the idea of praying crossed his mind – who thinks that God had anything to do with Auschwitz. Levi rejected even non-religious views that seemed to place the horrors in which he participated beyond the limits of ordinary thought and analysis: what he ...”

“... come from the extraordinary George Drysdale. He was born in 1824, the second youngest son of Sir William Drysdale, a leading Edinburgh citizen and one-time City Treasurer. ‘Our idolised boy’, as his sister called him, had a dazzling career at Edinburgh Academy, and in 1841 embarked with no less lustre on a Classics degree at Glasgow. Then the darkness ...”

“... analogy is suggestive. Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto is convincingly read here as high camp. But there are important differences, too. Gothic represents a ruined or fractured realism, excessive because its desire carries it beyond the ego and social convention; Post-Modern horror belongs to an epoch in which horror itself has become ...”

“... Paris/London, East Berlin.’ ‘Be sure there’s a World War Two flashback, preferably to a camp.’ In the final scene: ‘Overlook the ruins of something,’ possibly backlit by flames. One of the most painful aspects of the history of this century is that a man like Adolf Hitler should have been so vital to its forging. His most authoritative German ...”

“... the seas and come … to B … a small town fastened to a field in Indiana,’ the late, great William Gass began his imperishable short story ‘In the Heart of the Heart of the Country’, from 1968. Or, with his and your permission, ‘I have sailed the seas and come … to G … a healthcare mecca and football burg that was previously a town with a ...”

“... War of Independence (1868-78), which abolished slavery. Cuba became a de facto colony under William McKinley after the Spanish-American War. The Platt Amendment of 1901 defined Cuban ‘sovereignty’ in terms that ceded control of the island’s military, trade agreements, infrastructure and most of its agriculture to Washington. It has somehow been ...”

“... enthusiasm for Patton: Lust for Glory that would seem to have had world-historical consequences. William Rogers, then secretary of state, called the president a ‘walking ad’ for the movie. The White House chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, advised his young aides to see the film to get a handle on Nixon’s mindset. Kissinger saw it as a sign that he had ...”

“... my youth.’ He had spent thirteen years there. Delacroix ‘loved only his studio’, Maxime du Camp said, ‘and it was there he preferred to live.’ Delacroix once described it as a ‘crucible’, in which base substances underwent transformation and mysteries were revealed, ‘in which human genius, at the peak of its development, brings back into ...”

“... dazzling, and she developed a crush on her of almost schoolgirl intensity. In November 1688, when William of Orange landed in England to oust Anne’s father, King James II, the Marlboroughs seized their chance. Sarah helped the Princess to escape from Whitehall and brought her safely to William’s ...”

“... the great (Diaghilev, the Sitwells), one is often keener to learn of the luck his rival and friend William Walton was having. Walton’s history lurks in the shadows of the Lambertian narrative, and his more succulent achievement stimulates the greater curiosity. As for George Lambert’s overall failure, Motion himself supplies the required epitaph: ‘At a ...”

“... In the reign of Edward VI, an Exeter clergyman named William Herne, an enthusiast for the gospel, told one of the city’s aldermen that he would rather be torn apart by wild horses than ever again say the Catholic Mass. In December 1553, Queen Mary newly enthroned, the alderman entered his parish church to find Herne at the altar, in his old vestments and all ready to go ...”