“... aggressor and none of his neighbours, or his neighbours’ powerful friends, believed him when he said he had put away his weapons for good. Puffing on his pipe, the older man offered reassurance. Many years ago he was known as the most dangerous man in his neighbourhood, yet now everyone thought of him as harmless. Several months have passed since tea and ...”

“... or isolated one from the other. They work in combination all the way through. Consider what is said, for example, about Bellow’s response to the death of his mother, in 1933, when he was 17 years old. In the second chapter this is described as a ‘lifelong mourning … a bondage doomed to play itself out in five marriages and a string of failed ...”

“... the artist’s fantasies about himself.’ It also, of course, matches what Hughes has just said about him. I say ‘poignancy’ because Hughes clearly cares a great deal about art, artists, politics, culture in general, Australia, Barcelona, religion, the American redemptive idea, Amish quiltmaking, and every other damn thing he’s written about. He ...”

“... became President on the death of Roosevelt in 1945, it was customary to laugh at him. It was said that the United States had exalted the common, ordinary man, and that they were now landed with one as their leader. But the critics were confounded as the small-town politician readily assumed the status of a world leader who, with unusual decisiveness, put ...”

“... magazines and saw photos of what our allies’ bombing planes had done to the city of Port Said at the head of the canal, I felt glad that Americans didn’t have to look at pictures like those as our work.’ Ellsberg returned to Harvard to write his doctoral dissertation – on a typically American subject, game theory – and then accepted a ...”

“... finished off with a varnish that has aged into a rich yellowy-brown: the total effect is sometimes said to resemble an etching, which is true enough, though it resembles something else even more, as Colin Harrison says in his excellent handbook to Palmer: a carved ivory. The Valley Thick with Corn is one of the most beautiful expressions of what Palmer’s son ...”

“... an earlier volume, Labels, an account of a Mediterranean voyage, he did not write much about Port Said because, he said, his experiences there ‘approximate too nearly to English life’, but almost everything feels like a version of home. The cathedral at Málaga reminds him of the chapel at Hertford, his old Oxford ...”

“... parent, but when my father died, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer more or less adopted me,’ Judy Garland once said. To get a tiny idea of the strangeness of her position, watch the recording made in 1937 of the 14-year-old Garland with a sweet, rounded face and kiss curls singing ‘You Made Me Love You’ as a fan letter to Clark Gable, with a scrapbook of his pictures ...”

“... much needed, since Annan’s own powers of expression were wooden to say the least. This pair, Edward Mortimer and Nader Mousavizadeh, came from the Financial Times and the New Republic respectively, two publications whose political profiles need little specification. Not surprisingly, Annan’s various pronouncements, applauded for their eloquence by ...”

“... as little more than an invitation to fraud’. Sanford Levinson, a progressive law professor, said that he had become increasingly dismayed by ‘the costs to intellectual honesty of the felt need to shoehorn one’s arguments into the language of “diversity”’. In 2014, Students for Fair Admissions, a group created by ...”

“... authorising and justifying the operation, extending as far as the late Lord Widgery and the frail Edward Heath, British PM at the time, who has agreed to give evidence when the Inquiry transfers (and re-creates its technology) in Central Hall, Westminster, later this year, to hear what amounts to the Army’s case for the defence.Are the usual penalties for ...”

“... Mulder (although that former minister has since gone into spectacular political eclipse). He said that ‘when the National Party policy is taken to its logical conclusion, there will no longer be a black man in South Africa who has South African citizenship.’ Theconjuring trick is achieved by bringing about the independence of the Homelands, so ...”

“... the delicious Money-Coutts. (Money Counts?) There was even a triple-barrelled name: Edward Packe-Drury-Lowe – inherently absurd because of the prospect of infinite fission: if triple, why not quadruple or quintuple? One of the boys in my house had the surname Christie. His father owned Glyndebourne. ‘Christie’ meant something to me, so I ...”

“... often they did not return. Trimble’s political career began with the prorogation of Stormont by Edward Heath on 24 March 1972 – ‘I am,’ he says, ‘the product of the destruction of Stormont’ – but it was fuelled by grief and anger along the way. Grief especially at the murder by the IRA of his close friend and colleague in the Queen’s ...”

“... in the footsteps of Gogol in Dead Souls – a matter Mr Hingley does not discuss. ‘I realise,’ said Chekhov, ‘that Gogol will turn in his grave, being Russian literature’s King of the Steppe. I’ve well-meaningly trespassed on his preserves, but I haven’t half botched things.’ Yegorushka’s journey reaches a high point at the country inn run by ...”