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“... Life, invented by Milton Bradley in 1860, which was itself a reinvention of Elizabeth Newbery and John Wallis’s moralising New Game of Human Life from 1790. The 18th-century version had a snakes-and-ladders set-up: players were sent forward to maturity when they landed on virtues and back to childhood when they landed on vices. It was unplayably boring; the ...”

“... officials were Masons and Bongo was encouraged to establish his own lodges in Gabon in order to foster solidarity with Elf. Bongo’s loyalty to the Gaullist party and Elf was so strong that when Mitterrand came to power in 1981, the Gabonese leader threatened to switch to US oil partners. In the end a compromise was reached – Mitterrand agreed not to ...”

“... that his near invisibility sustained his authority and he never sought the limelight, but as John Macnicol points out in a brief but sharp entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, for two decades his word was, almost literally, law: ‘In the interwar years no policy proposal could proceed to legislation without the actuary’s ...”

“... these letters underscore the significance of her rejection of a literary life and her refusal to foster a public image. Although she had acquaintances in the literary world (her correspondents included H.G. Wells, Bryher, H.D. and John Cowper Powys), most of her life was lived in obscurity, and her friendships were mainly ...”

“... Spanish American literature, finally to reach the enormous audiences they deserve. Already, John Fowles in a Guardian essay has used the Chronicle to great effect as a prism through which to see the battle for the Malvinas. No doubt the Sun will shortly advise its readers to do the same. No doubt Sandy Woodward is a fan of the tale of Colonel Aureliano ...”

“... compared with the improbable but just possible gallery of types who combine to make Joan Foster’s life unbearable: Paul, the Polish count who writes sentimental novels about doctors and nurses; Arthur, the Canadian radical nationalist preoccupied with a journal called Resurgence; Fraser Buchanan, the blackmailer of the literary world; and, above ...”

“... in Oberkampf in the 1990s, and in his photography book and in his jazz book, and in the one about John Berger he did in 1986, as he was starting out. He writes, often, about romance and glamour and pleasure and excitement. Even more, he writes about listlessness and ambivalence and prevarication, the digressions and distractions that seem to stop him getting ...”

“... orphancy’, abandoned by a youthful mother who fled back to Italy, abandoned also by a series of foster mothers. An early epiphany was the memory of bathing with one of these surrogates, golden light playing on her pubic fleece. ‘I remember the black hair on her cunt and the water. Now that’s a good shot for a two-year old.’ Corso the bedwetter was a ...”

“... was time to pull down their cowshed and build a visitors’ centre. At the Vatican, however, Pope John Paul II disregarded a petition to complete Hildegard’s formal canonisation process (aborted in 1243) and declare her a doctor of the Church. Evidently, this most uppity of medieval women is not a model the Pope wants to raise up for emulation in the new ...”

“... They really talked: David Footman, Nicholas Elliott, Sir Robert Mackenzie, George Carey-Foster, Sir Frederick Warner, agents and diplomats on the security side, and a large anonymous group of Intelligence men from both branches of the service, retired and active. The reason can be guessed at. Boyle’s American breakthrough depended upon the Freedom ...”

“... Such high-profile acquisitions are seized upon by opportunistic commentators, all too keen to foster suspicions of Japanese duplicity, racism and greed. Writing about Japan, its society and its foreign affairs has to an overwhelming degree become the preserve of alarmist political economists. Yet who is served by the perpetuation of the simplistic image ...”

“... Panther party militant and the festival along with it: ‘I think this is a pile of shit while John Sinclair rots in prison.’ (Like Hoffman, Pete Townshend went off-message from ‘the spirit of Woodstock’ at that point. ‘Fuck off!’ he announced. ‘Fuck off my fucking stage!’) But Lang never imagined the festival as a political event and it ...”

“... Monroe and a series of men identified, either explicitly or implicitly, by capitalised titles: the Foster Father, the High School Teacher, the Police Officer, the Young Husband, the Photographer, the Gemini, the Director, the Ex-Athlete, the Playwright, the President. Oates’s fiction is a theatre of types rather than individuals. The inner lives of her ...”

“... lists a spinning wheel.’ The familiarity here discourages the scepticism that historians should foster. And how do we know that she herself tended to her babies? When we peer through a window, we sometimes see ourselves reflected in the glass. The book is based on the Slade Lectures delivered in Cambridge in 2001, and the desire to engage a non-specialist ...”

“... start again on a new page: in Hunting Mister Heartbreak (1990), Raban adopts a different identity (John Rayburn, Rainbird) for each place he visits. In Waxwings, set in the ‘virtual city’ of Seattle at the height of the dot.com boom, American reality bites back. A professor’s bookish enthusiasm for the ‘Jeffersonian ideal of life, liberty and the ...”