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“... a combination of left-wing ideas and journalistic flair often earned Burchett space on the front page when newspapers in London were reduced to four pages through shortage of newsprint. While ‘island-hopping’ in the Pacific, and ‘shuffling along in the chow line for lunch’ on board a ship, he heard about ‘the big new bomb we just dropped on the ...”

“... be callous about it – and we are all callous when it comes to disasters relived on the printed page – their lives make excellent biographies. Not only do they suffer in a dramatic way: they do it more purposefully than the rest of us, with our dull sense of un-satisfactoriness, can manage. Sequences of chaos and catastrophe in the life of an artist ...”

“... was to save that manuscript! He joked about everything but not about this. Heller began the first page of every book hoping to write something for the ages. He managed it once, critics generally agree, but his later efforts all fell short. The problem was the standard. A book for the ages requires something more than a talented author with a good idea at the ...”

“... the lorry-driver was no oil-painting. This strange story can’t have escaped the sharp eye of Bruce Chatwin, who is an expert on strange places and strange people and on strange words, and who used to work for the Sunday Times. Chatwin is an admired writer who has now published three books. In Patagonia told of a trip to Latin America’s Ultima ...”

“... passing up the particular social opportunity then on offer, and later, when Mr Ramus the King’s page invited him to St James’s, he noted: ‘Formerly I should have jumped at such an opening. I am now too far advanced. Yet I may go.’ It’s like Crusoe feeling he can’t use the ship-wrecked money but then deciding to keep it, accelerated to the tempo of ...”

“... hubris: ‘The Greeks have a word for it,’ we were repeatedly told. Jock (now Lord) Bruce-Gardyne, former Economic Secretary to the Treasury, managed to combine at least two of these factors in an article in the Times, ‘Hounded out by Hypocrisy’, the day after Mr Parkinson’s resignation. ‘So that great British tradition, hypocrisy, has ...”

“... is typed over in red, and a short red line has been typed below the date. The verso of the title-page is blank; thereafter the pages are numbered in the centre at the bottom –1–, –2– etc. The essay ends at the bottom of p. 29 which is not numbered but has the final ornament ___ooOoo___, with the O and os in red. The verso of the final sheet is ...”

“... one of the reasons ‘the face of the British gangster is changing.’ But Mad Frankie Fraser and Bruce Reynolds – both of whom have recently written memoirs – aren’t the only old crooks being forced to change their ways, if we are to believe Denise Deegan, whose Managing Activism: A Guide to Dealing with Activists and Pressure Groups was published in ...”

“... and ought to have been pulped on publication). The new one, admirably curated by a team led by Bruce Frier, is based on a draft made by the Wyoming justice Fred H. Blume (1875-1971) that had languished in manuscript for decades. Frier and company secured the use of the text from Blume’s estate, with all profits from the expensive three-volume set, its ...”

“... on the eve of the Battle of Flodden in 1513. That is followed immediately by a nearly twenty-page selection from Gavin Douglas’s great translation of the Aeneid ‘written in the language of Scottis natioun’, completed in that same year. This juxtaposition of Latin, Gaelic and Scots may point to different Scotlands; yet there are shared features. The ...”

“... of ‘Fright Decade I’, the war against civilisation by terrorists. For Bill Green on the same page of the Post, ‘the Iranian obscenity’ raised the possibility that the ‘freedom of the press’ which presented news about Iran might be ‘perverted into a weapon aimed directly at the heart of American nationalism and self-esteem’. There were some ...”

“... and rushed back to Kennedy, who gave Dillon the job. Graham also recommended his friend David Bruce for Secretary of State, advice the President-elect didn’t take, choosing Dean Rusk instead. At Graham’s suggestion, Bruce became Ambassador in London, and before very long Graham was badgering Kennedy to sack Rusk and ...”

“... In 1975, Perry Anderson published Lineages of the Absolutist State, at the end of which is an 87-page ‘Note’ on the theory of the Asiatic mode. Anderson shows that Marx’s views on Asia differed little from those of Hegel, Montesquieu, Adam Smith and a host of others; they were all peering through the wrong end of a telescope, or in a mirror, weighing a ...”

“... reporters (all two of them). Take a long and detailed article by Judith Miller, buried on page 12 of the New York Times: only in the 30th paragraph of 34 do we learn that prewar American Intelligence on Iraqi weapons sites was often ‘stunningly wrong’. In the words of a senior US officer: The teams would be given a packet, with pictures and a ...”

“... conservatives complained that Fox News, the National Review and the Wall Street Journal editorial page had done their side a disservice by asserting that Romney would win (he may have believed them too: he didn’t write a concession speech). Everyone else was listening to the New York Times statistician Nate Silver, whose incessant poll-crunching put the ...”