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“... Petite, just five feet tall, though a bit too plump to be an ideal cox, she fell for the guy between whose outstretched legs she had to plant her feet as she steered the boat with a loop of string. Having been a cox myself, of a house four when I was 12, I know the peculiar intimacy between cox and stroke: the rub of leg on leg, the intense eye ...”

“... home: Philby in Ambala, India, son of the eccentric explorer of Arabia (and Ford motor agent) St John Philby; Sorge in Baku, Russia to a German petroleum engineer and his Russian wife, the daughter of a prosperous capitalist from Kiev. Politically, Sorge’s lineage was even more exotic than Philby’s: while his father was a staunch subject of the ...”

“... which of them were homosexuals and so on, Cornish dodgily assuming, as did Andrew Boyle and John Costello before him, that homosexuality is itself a bond and that if two men can be shown to be homosexual the likelihood is that they’re sleeping together. So we trail down that road looking for cliques and coteries with even G.M. Trevelyan’s sexual ...”

“... Highgate.’ He adapts the tone and texture of other ex-spooks who ‘went over’: Ian Fleming, John le Carré. He admits that his dialogue is invented, all his East End villains are squeezed into one composite character, Mickey Williams. MI6 became nervous of the Marks connection in the wake of the Littlejohn affair, two brothers they had sponsored, going ...”

“... he was voting for its former host because we need a president with ‘rough edges’. ‘We need a guy with big ones right here,’ he said, pointing with both hands to his crotch. He said he’d voted for Bill Clinton but felt differently about Hillary. ‘I just can’t take her. Her voice is like sandpaper.’ A few yards away a dozen Hasidic Jews were ...”

“... whom they forgive.It wasn’t that he was particularly good-looking – according to his friend John Lehmann he was ‘a great, untidy, sprawling figure of a young man’. Virginia Woolf blamed his lack of looks on his father’s family: ‘He had a strong element of the Bell in him. What do I mean? I think I mean that he was practical & caustic & shrewd ...”

“... into terrible atrocities. My Lai happened because officers failed.’ Another Marine, Captain John McNamara, wrote home in 1967 that he was appalled by the loose talk he heard among his fellow officers about the need to employ terrorist tactics against terrorists: ‘Just a few years ago it was confined to the fringe. If the actual [US ...”

“... adviser liked the idea but wanted to get an ‘expert’ take on it, too. ‘Within five minutes a guy from Deloitte was in the room,’ the consultant told me. ‘He clearly had a pass for the department.’ So far, the British government has handed out Covid-19 consultancy contracts worth more than £100 million. In September, the Guardian revealed that ...”

“... very soon, I lose the markers by which I have navigated, the beacons by which I know myself. Like John Clare leaving the tight circle of experience around the village of Helpston (then in Northamptonshire), I step out of my knowledge, to the tottering edge of an abyss known as ‘the future’ or ‘the human contract’. Mortality. Of place and ...”

“... making the country’s first chocolate bar, Chocolat Délicieux à Manger. Like Joseph Fry, John Cadbury had gone from selling cups of drinking chocolate to manufacturing the base product, in 1831, with the help of a steam engine, in a rented four-storey building in a back alley in Birmingham. In the early years his cocoa got a warrant from Queen ...”

“... out herds bred over centuries in Wales. Small farmers, whelped on Common Market subsidies and John Constable idylls, were being priced out of existence by agribusiness and Tesco. In time, the three of us – Karl, Seamus and me – decided to go out there partly to see what we could see but also as a way of spending time in company with people who shared ...”

“... Pollock was distancing himself from Benton. Some time in the late Thirties he began to frequent John Graham, that most mysterious of all the gurus of European Modernism. Graham took him up, reinforcing his faith in unconscious imagery. From now on, Pollock transferred his admiration and his envy to Picasso, enlarging his ambition to a world scale. Guernica ...”

“... seen. Not a few of the characters the boom brought with it were larger than life too: ex-Governor John Connally of Texas, for example, still scarred from the Kennedy shooting, hustling for oil companies and on the way down to the bankruptcy that broke him, and T. Boone Pickens, the greenmail king, so thrilled with his acquisition of the Mesa field (which he ...”

“... role. This is a life which is simply going through the motions, doggedly repeating its lines. John Nower’s fate appears determined in advance by the blood feud he inherits. His only destiny is to revenge his father’s murder and so perpetuate the feud. The strange fusion of Anglo-Saxon attitudes and up-to-date allusion (cars and gangsters and ...”

“... wilderness renamed is still a wilderness,’ writes Lawson-Peebles in apparent agreement with John Quincy Adams and Joseph Hall, both of whom had scorned the ‘edenic’ fables told about the West. But is it? Yes, in the sense that you can still starve or freeze or get eaten in it. But we’re talking about writing and reading here. To an audience ...”