“... Macintyre suggested that conventional histories of the war operated ‘in shades of black and white’ with clear-cut heroes and villains, whereas in his brand of history – which has become a kind of franchise, with this latest volume following his previous bestsellers, Agent Zigzag and Operation Mincemeat – the moral lines are more ‘blurred’ and ...”

“... my resistant life yield to the light cleavages of what seems true,                 white heights and green deeps. The three major books that followed The Opening of the Field – Roots and Branches (1964), Bending the Bow (1968) and Ground Work: Before the War (1984) – recorded Duncan’s continued search for an art that might ‘tune the ...”

“... He is wearing the same literary-critical uniform too: the baggy jacket and the wide-collared white shirt, open to the sternum. He holds a book, closed around his index finger, which is still marking the place. It is as if he has agreed to stop reading for just a moment, so that the photo can be taken. He stares straight at the camera and his expression ...”

“... to the liberal jurisprudence of the 1960s and 1970s, has long been criticised by the left. As William Brennan, the liberal titan of the court in the second half of the 20th century, declared in 1985, ‘Those who would restrict claims of right to the values of 1789 specifically articulated in the constitution turn a blind eye to social progress and eschew ...”

“... for operating as ‘a money-hustling hag’: noticing how admired her husband is among ‘young white men drawn to the more “transgressive” elements of modernism’, she sets about ‘milking money’ from these ‘Bataille Boys’, renting out Sylvère’s attention for ever higher fees. She invests the money in real estate, buying unpleasant ...”

“... in American suits beating up a shopkeeper; beggars fighting over their pitches; beautiful White Russian bar-girls smiling at passers-by’. It struck him as ‘a magical place, a self-generating fantasy that left my own little mind far behind’. Later, after the Japanese invasion of 1937 but before the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 and the ...”

“... A spirit storming in blank walls, A dirty house in a gutted world, A tatter of shadows peaked to white, Smeared with the gold of the opulent sun. My passenger pigeon poem acknowledges that the information it contains has been gleaned from the internet, but it also deploys the Sterne/Burton defence by taking in some allusions, including the ‘opulent ...”

“... because this is the Brando we have mostly seen on screen since Apocalypse Now: in A Dry White Season (1989), for example, where he plays a South African lawyer with a heavy stylistic debt to Charles Laughton; in Don Juan DeMarco (1995), where he plays an amiable psychologist who gets to dance with Faye Dunaway; in The Score (2001), where he plays ...”

“... have made us more aware of the competences involved in reading. By rejecting the hegemony of Dead White European Males they have helped to bring such neglected writers as Sarah Fielding into the canon. Theory has drawn attention to marginalised groups, making it harder to ignore the ‘black-creole face of Bertha Mason’ in Jane Eyre. Above all, Theory has ...”

“... for having ‘conquered America’, and thereby preparing the way for Freud’s own arrival. When William James and many other leading American intellectuals turned out to hear him speak, Freud felt that psychoanalysis had been given official recognition for the first time. ‘In Europe I felt as though I were despised,’ he was to write, ‘but over there I ...”

“... When I came up – torn, filthy, and stinking – from under the capsized car, I felt the white-hot iron of joy deliciously pass through my heart! It is only once they are ‘smeared with good factory muck – plastered with metallic waste, with senseless sweat, with celestial soot’ that he and his confrères can proclaim their manifesto, and hymn ...”

“... Infiltrators and informers posed significant problems for the IRA leadership. The memoir of William Matchett, a former RUC man, stated that at any given time one IRA member in 33 was a Special Branch agent. If one adds agents who were handled by the army and MI5 the total was far higher. Many were never discovered and a few have subsequently written ...”

“... pounding the back lots and working the studio corridors, at the age of 29 Clancy drove his red and white DeSoto convertible across America and went into European exile. ‘It came back to this, the sheer shock, in my own country, of walking along the street and seeing faces behind which are no ideas, or even enjoyment. No. No more of this. It was time to ...”

“... shy and misunderstood. The following year he received a presidential pardon due in part, the White House said, to lobbying by the powerful and unlikely duo of Henry Kissinger and Elton John. Nonetheless Amiel remains furious at the way she and Black have been treated and is intent on establishing his innocence on all counts. Her memoir is a bookend to ...”

“... Remember the images of Angelina Jolie walking across the stage, hand outstretched to greet William Hague at their ‘summit’ on rape as a war crime in London in 2014? It struck me then that she was being offered as a trade-off or collateral damage in the effort to bring such violence to an end. The initiative is now seen as a costly failure; the ...”