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“... worldview was crumbling under the pressure of accumulative data. In a paper published in 1962, Harry Hess, a geologist at Princeton and former naval captain, proposed that the mid-Atlantic ridge was in the middle of the Atlantic because the continents were moving away from it at an equal rate: the ocean was getting wider and growing new crust at its ...”

“... people: Penelope Gilliatt, Lillian Hellman, Isaiah Berlin, Mike Nichols and Elaine May, Harry Levin, W.H. Auden, Malraux, James Baldwin, Stravinsky, Robert Lowell etc. None of these people, however, furnishes Wilson with anything like a satisfying number of thoughtful passages in the journals. This is partly a result of misleading editing by Lewis ...”

“... characters weave in and out of the story, from the great (Wagner) to the now quite obscure (Count Harry Kessler). Rykwert’s favoured protagonists tend to avoid being pinned down to any one vocation; he doesn’t even require that they count architecture or visual art among their pursuits. Wagner features as a political ...”

“... These are women with names like Bubble Carew-Pole and Charlotte Bradley-Hanford and Juliet Mount Charles. Women who can say things like ‘My parents chose Wycombe Abbey because it was the nearest girls’ boarding school to Harley Street,’ or ‘My parents chose Heathfield because none of the girls had spots.’ Or, ‘My mother went to West Heath ...”

“... them. The journalists of the Sunday Times were summoned to a meeting on Monday morning at the Mount Pleasant Hotel, around the corner from our offices in the Gray’s Inn Road. We wait for the management’s offer but it turns out that there is no offer. In return for a salary increase of £2000 a year and membership of a private health scheme all ...”

“... that accompanied the match made much of the king’s achievements. They stressed the ‘rich mount’ of his prosperity, playing on the name of his father’s earldom (Richmond) and his own new palace by the Thames; his likeness to God on earth; the fusing of the white rose and the red in his marriage to Elizabeth of York; its progeny; and its ...”

“... North Carolina, Georgia and Florida – a jet-fuelled version of the whistle-stop tour by which Harry Truman in 1948 demonstrated his political nerve against the favourite and eventual loser of that year, Thomas E. Dewey. The implied comparison, in 2020, was with the passive, careful, non-reactive campaign of Joe Biden, who arranged to be caught on camera ...”

“... which vanquishes Condon and DeLillo while leaving spare capacity for the imagination. And here is Harry Hubbard, his outwardly insipid narrator. Hubbard is a white-collar type of CIA man, a ‘ghost’ writer of planted texts, who is vicariously thrilled by the knowledge that he is working with ruthless men. He meets his ‘other half’ of the Agency, Dix ...”

“... his father and five of his friends had sat to Devis 13 years before. Wright poses them casually. Harry Peckham stands with hand on hip; he was to die after breaking his neck while hunting. Nicholas Heath sits with his arm over the back of his chair; he changed his name to Nicholas Nicholas when he inherited an estate, Boy Court. Mrs Wilmot, painted in riding ...”

“... that film comedy was a commercial goldmine, there would have been no Keaton, or Harold Lloyd, or Harry Langdon. He laid the path along which they swept to success. I wish Robinson had found the space to explain a little about the sad fate of so many of the films. His accounts are based upon seeing the early films in their best surviving form. Most people are ...”

“... new recruits or ‘remounts’, as they were called in a phrase that would have appealed to Sir Harry Flashman. Hersch Gottlieb, Sam Lubelski, ‘Napoleon’ Dickenfaden and other notorieties negotiated for them with agents and principals (that is, parents) at the equivalent of trade fairs in Poland and Austrian Galicia. One well-known exchange point, where ...”

“... inventing a number of imaginary artists: according to fake stories fed to the newspapers, ‘Harry Kipper’ went missing in January 1995 while tracing the word ‘art’ across Europe on his mountain bike; ‘Darko Maver’, a Serbian sculptor and conceptual artist who made models of bloody corpses, was said to have died in a Nato bombing raid in ...”

“... The bringing to light of Cold War landmarks like the Presidential emergency relocation centre at Mount Weather, Virginia (first acknowledged to exist in 1974, ironically after a TWA plane crashed very close to it), or the NSA itself in Bamford’s first book, simply reinforced the suspicion that elsewhere there must be an even deeper bunker, an even more ...”

“... of the greasy pole of precedence in the world of letters. He went spelunking in the crater of Mount Vesuvius; explored ancient Egyptian science, technology and magic; reconstructed ancient devices such as the flying model dove of Archytas, the Tarentine philosopher, and built astonishing modern ones, including the sunflower clock, a timekeeping device ...”

“... Octavio Paz, Louis Zukofsky and Charles Olson. As did any number of critics: Edmund Wilson, Harry Levin, Jacques Barzun, Lionel Trilling, Guy Davenport. Were all of them hornswoggled, taken in by the surface polish and acrobatics of Cummings’s style and, those who knew him, by his great personal charm, unable to register the paucity of ...”