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“... and wants more than prison for Hampton is J. Edgar Hoover, played with splendid unction by Martin Sheen. The first piece of action in the film shows O’Neal pretending to arrest some billiard players in a bar. He flashes a badge that is supposed to prove he is employed by the FBI, but all he really wants to do is create enough havoc to allow him to ...”

“... necessitated by the different truths they are trying to share with us. The narrator of ‘Samuel Johnson is Indignant: that Scotland has so few trees’ (that’s the title and the whole story) is a very different person from the lover of gardens and doctors who worries over herself in ‘Thyroid Diary’ and compares herself to the perpetually withering ...”

“... left in the innocence bank; we are rich on suspicion. In literature, contemporary examples abound. Martin Amis, for instance, offers his own brief allegory of the writer’s modern suspicion in The Information. Richard Tull, a novelist, hears birds singing in his garden, and thinks, mournfully: ‘say birds were just parrots and learned their songs from what ...”

“... to open the games. Only Americans – Dennis Mitchell after winning a 100-metres heat and Michael Johnson after taking the 200-metre gold – puffed out their chests and pulled their jerseys to display the national emblem. Only Americans accused an Irish swimmer of using drugs when she won the Olympic gold. Only an eliminated American boxer, Fernando ...”

“... mort saisit le vif’ – the dead grasps the living. When Margery Langrich, of the parish of St Martin Orgar (at the head of London Bridge), died in 1470 she left to her second oldest son, Thomas, a ‘nut’ – a coconut shell made into a drinking vessel, covered with silver and gilt decorations – as well as linens for table and bed marked ‘T’ and ...”

“... Lyndon Johnson always believed he would be president. As a boy in Texas, growing up in poor and sometimes desperate circumstances, he told anyone who would listen that he was headed for the White House. He mapped out a plan to get there from which, as Robert Caro writes, ‘he refused to be diverted.’ It meant first establishing himself in state politics, then winning a seat in the House of Representatives, then moving up to the Senate and finally to the highest office ...”

“... upward blip in 1987 or 1988 – the curve of Labour support has gone downwards ever since. R.W. Johnson’s often perverse, sometimes brilliant and always provocative volume of essays provides a splendid point of departure for exploring the connections between these two themes. The best one is a discursive enquiry into the cultural roots of British ...”

“... ideology is closer to their Neo-Confucian forebears. The defector Hwang Jang-yop told Bradley Martin that the two Kims ‘turned Stalinism and Marxism-Leninism on their heads by reverting to Confucian notions’. After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, a picture emerged of Kim Il Sung in a Soviet uniform with a medal on his lapel. Like Ho Chi Minh, he ...”

“... character in English literature, unmitigated by the humour and grudging respect that breaks out in Johnson on the Scots. Among the small would-be nations Byron also tried to help was Armenia, not mentioned in this book. After arriving in Venice in 1816, he provided money for an Armenian dictionary, and did some work on it himself. Is there a statue to him, or ...”

“... studies of the subject have appeared since (by historians such as Paul Preston, Raymond Carr and Martin Blinkhorn, to mention three British examples). My memories of Homage to Catalonia were not only of the fine, evocative writing, perhaps Orwell’s best, but of his enthusiasm for the people with whom he had lived and fought. If, for some people of my ...”

“... in their empty hands, Mama’s hands, and fell asleep under their caress.’ This is a solace that Martin, the fetishist, would keenly appreciate. It is in a glove, so to speak, that he experiences his first sensual encounter with Antoinette, the love of his life: ‘that little fabric hand that I could squeeze in my hand, put in my pocket, Antoinette’s ...”

“... Winning is very important to Christopher Hitchens. Dr Johnson was said to ‘talk for victory’, and by all accounts it seems the same might be said of Hitchens. He certainly writes for victory. His preferred genre is the polemic; his favoured tone mixes forensic argument with high-octane contempt. And no one can accuse him of only picking on boys his own size: he is happy to take the ring against tubby, bespectacled former diplomats and little, shrivelled old ladies as well as (special contempt here) relatively fit joggers ...”

“... as well as satirise the paranoia which was exacerbated by the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King in 1968 and seemed to find its justification in the Watergate revelations. Richard Condon’s novel The Manchurian Candidate – an eerie anticipation published in 1959 and then turned into a Hollywood film which appeared during the Cuban ...”

“... rural living, still defines life east of the Mississippi. Even today, in the tourist brochures of Johnson City (the location for Verghese’s story), the percentage of the population who are non-white is listed to reassure prospective visitors (7.2 per cent, for the record). Tourism trades happily on this humiliating past. Henning, the birthplace of Alex ...”

“... Towards the end, I asked the table: ‘If it all goes wrong, who will you hate the most: Gove, Johnson, or Farage?’ Gove was beneath numerical notice; Johnson got seven votes; I put my own marker against Farage. In the context of Brexit, Johnson seemed to me just a ...”