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“... on how many whites lived there – that is, whether there were enough to keep the blacks down.) Philip Murphy, the excellent editor of these fascinating volumes of (mainly) official documents, confesses himself at a loss to explain why Nyasaland in particular was ever included, unless it was simply to justify the title of ‘federation’, for which three ...”

“... his father in Simla and his mother in London, Patrick Leigh Fermor set off to walk from the Hook of Holland to Istanbul. He was 19, an engaging lad, especially attractive to aristocrats who lived in castles and had similarly disposed friends further along the way. His inspiration for these peregrinations was Helen Waddell’s The Wandering Scholars ...”

“... later, Wallace is no longer with us, but two of the Great Male Narcissists he cited, Updike and Philip Roth, are still displaying their self-absorbency and depriving tender young empaths of valuable column inches. With an almost audible sigh, Updike concedes that the pups have a point. ‘He or she may feel, as the grey-haired scribes of the day continue to ...”

“... could take over the Labour leadership. This fantastic nonsense has been finally laid to rest in Philip Williams’s biography of Gaitskell. Arthur Martin’s obsession was quickly passed on to his colleague Peter Wright. ‘Spycatcher’ Wright never once in his long and unglamorous career caught a spy. Instead, he and Martin pursued ‘suspects’ in the ...”

“... were rare; but failing a silver spoon or a golden handshake, you could generally use a title to hook a ‘golden dolly’. These heiresses from the nouveaux riches, willing to barter their dowries for a name, are a staple of society fiction – but fiction hardly does justice to reality. Heading the golden dolly league in Regency London was the Coutts ...”

“... they had here or there?’ Whether you answer yes or no to that, doesn’t let Shelton off the hook: in fact, it makes his position worse, because he is palpably condescending both to Dylan and to his own readers. If there is pain and scandal in a person’s life, and you are broadcasting that life to others, what good does it do to mumble into the ...”

“... pressures exerted on young Daphne by her amorous, possessive father Gerald – who played Captain Hook/Mr Darling on the stage and passed on a dire Peter-Panishness to her – were the now forgotten bestsellers of a man who spoke to the anxieties of the 1890s. Peter Ibbetson (1891) was an earlier Peter Pan, the fantasy of a cloudless boyhood in pre-Haussmann ...”

“... with Keith doing his best, as he confesses, to ‘ponce off the spirit of the times’. Philip Larkin – the usual – is quoted on the matter; there’s a bouncy riff about ‘girls acting like boys’ being ‘in the air’, and another about all the ‘cool pants’ a chick has to buy if she hopes to carry things off. Keith and his friends are ...”

“... and interpretations’, and the crazy-enough-to-be-true projections of Thomas Pynchon, Philip K. Dick, William Burroughs and J.G. Ballard (who wrote incisively about Surrealism). The afterlife of Surrealism is more active in poetry, as in the New York School of Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery and others: ‘We all “grew up Surrealist”,’ Ashbery ...”

“... are the tools of America’s self-creation. ‘This country was born with a rifle in its hand,’ Philip Sharpe wrote in The Rifle in America (1938). ‘As a matter of fact, the rifle brought about the birth of these United States. The United States and the rifle are inseparable.’ They remain inseparable, and today that rifle is a high-tech, ‘polished ...”

“... of Soweto, outside Johannesburg. I sat with Lafont in his ill-lit office at the back of St Philip Neri, his parish church. The adjacent bedroom had been turned into a drop-in dormitory for young boys and as the night drew on it filled up. At regular intervals the office door would be pushed ajar and a bashful face would appear. A few words would be ...”

“... activists and notifying the committee that he had fired them. Among the writers in question: Philip and Julius Epstein and Howard Koch (authors of the screenplay for Casablanca), Irwin Shaw, Albert Maltz, Clifford Odets and Ring Lardner Jr. This surrender occurred at a key moment, Hoberman says, as reports of flying saucers turned oddly epidemic in the ...”

“... was the egg smuggler from the high Arctic who was able to brandish letters of support, signed ‘Philip’, on notepaper from Windsor Castle. (‘Falconers, just as much as birdwatchers, want to prevent the extinction of birds of prey. No one has worked harder to achieve this than Peter Whitehead.’) This was the man who now admitted – boasted of – his ...”

“... The dissident Left – as opposed to the proto-Communist Left – symbolised by Dwight Macdonald, Philip Rahv and others. The Cold War hardliners, such as Melvyn Lasky, Irving Kristol, James Burnham, Sidney Hook and later Norman Podhoretz. The ‘End of Ideology’ liberal professoriat: Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer, Lewis ...”

“... names such as Tashunka Witko (‘Crazy Horse’), Tatanka Iyotake (‘Sitting Bull’), Woqini (‘Hook Nose’) and Tashunka Kokipapi (‘Young Man Afraid of His Horses’), and even those of the ancient Maya (King ‘Jaguar Paw II’, ‘Smoking Frog’, now renamed ‘Fire Is Born’), so we could refer to famous Greeks as ‘He Who Loves Horses’ (...”