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“... by a code of omertà that buries news of their own felonies. It’s also that, as Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman pointed out long ago, the attempt to reach the ‘demographic’ sought by the advertisers who form the media’s staple revenue base means that content – including ‘news’ – is skewed towards the bland, upscale, aspirational. They ...”

“... are close: in November 1986 Le Pen made a special trip to visit the Moonie leader in Japan. Herman and Brodhead’s The Rise and Fall of the Bulgarian Connection has more to do with this strange and luxuriant world of right-wing extremism than one might at first suspect. It is at once the best and most careful analysis of the ‘Bulgarian plot to kill ...”

“... and make room for the future? Blueprint for a Green Economy, by David Pearce, Anil Markandya and Edward Barbier, is a report drawn up by the London Environment Centre for the UK Department of the Environment. It is a state-of-the-art review of ‘Sustainable Development, Resource Accounting and Project Development’. Starting with the idea of sustainable ...”

“... spot’. The islands’ blasted aspect, however, made them unpopular with visitors. Herman Melville, who visited in 1841, had the usual reaction: ‘Take five-and-twenty heaps of cinders dumped here and there in an outsize city lot, imagine some of them magnified into mountains, and the vacant lot the sea; and you will have a fit idea of the ...”

“... enormous best-seller in the United States. Elaborated in the hypertrophied, omniscient manner of Herman Wouk’s vastly popular ‘novelisations’ (the Hollywood term is, alone, appropriate) of the Second World War, The Winds of War, this is the story of the captain and crew of the eponymous nuclear attack submarine, pride of the Soviet fleet, as it ...”

“... the blessings of liberty to all mankind. ‘The past is the textbook of tyrants,’ wrote Herman Melville, ‘the future is the Bible of the free.’ Even today, despite the widespread popularity of historical novels and televised representations of the past, polls consistently show that few Americans possess a significant store of accurate knowledge ...”

“... Halleck gained a kind of afterlife in other men’s books. He is apparently present as Marko in Herman Melville’s Mardi (1849) and he and Drake reappear posthumously, living and working together under their own names, in Gore Vidal’s Burr (1973). So why is he now forgotten? It is the aim of Hallock’s book to restore Halleck’s reputation. (As their ...”

“... challenged by his insolent teenage slave, handed him over ‘to be broken’ by an overseer called Edward Covey. ‘Mr Covey succeeded in breaking me,’ Douglass wrote, ‘in body, soul and spirit.’ He was reduced to a beastlike stupor – but then one day he fought back, unnerving Covey, who didn’t want to admit that the 16-year-old still had the ...”

“... Man, Edwardian Sheringham, Valentine Ackland and Sylvia Townsend Warner, embroidery technique, Edward Meyerstein, Walt Disney, the Norfolk Giant, the pituitary gland, diabetes, MI5, and Einstein, who stayed at a (not very) ‘secret location’ on Roughton Heath, near Cromer, for some weeks in 1933. In each case, the reader follows the author following a ...”

“... who moonlighted as jazz musicians or aeronautical entrepreneurs. Among his friends were Rupert Edward Lee ‘Buddy’ Featherstonhaugh, who became the second British driver to win a Grand Prix race, Arthur Conan Doyle’s son Denis, and Prince Birabongse Bhanudej Bhanubandh of Siam, who raced as ‘B. Bira’ in a car painted ‘bright peacock blue, its ...”

“... keeps the prose furrowed and set firm. When, referring to the narwhal’s tusk, he writes that ‘Herman Melville drolly suggested they used it as a letter-opener,’ there is an audible note of disapproval in the ‘drolly’, as though laughter were not quite the appropriate response to such a natural miracle. The appropriate response is awe, wonder, a ...”

“... attempts to make films critical of the Reich. The first was already in the works. The screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz, who later wrote the script for Citizen Kane, and the producer Sam Jaffe had already announced an anti-Hitler feature, The Mad Dog of Europe. After the then Hollywood censor, Will Hays, advised them to drop the project, the treatment was sold to ...”

“... one too – that way Mary’s cause for jealousy would be removed. Sixty years later, talking to Edward Silsbee, Claire still put those two elements together. Pale Mary had been jealous of her ‘bright colour’, of the attention Shelley paid her and the hours he spent walking with her. After her adventure with Byron, she told Silsbee rather glibly, ‘Mrs ...”

“... finds a useful counterpoint in Michael Rogin’s Subversive Genealogy: The Politics and Art of Herman Melville (1979). In this account, Moby-Dick is not about what 20th-century scholars thought America should become, but about what it became in any case. Ishmael warns us against ‘scouting at Moby Dick as a . . . hideous and intolerable allegory’ – he ...”

“... Balkans. In her 1925 novel, The Secret of Chimneys, Agatha Christie depicted the London financier, Herman Isaacstein, in ‘very correct English shooting clothes which nevertheless sat strangely upon him. He had a fat yellow face and black eyes, as impenetrable as those of a cobra. There was a generous curve to the big nose and power in the square lines of the ...”