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“... of the authorities on both sides of the Atlantic. Senator Kerry believes (though Senator Brown does not always agree) that his investigation was deliberately and continually impeded by the Bush Administration. The close proximity of Bush to Irangate and now to Iraqgate makes that seem very likely. For British readers, however, the Senator’s report ...”

“... on them. The waterfront becomes a place of longing, and Mitchell writes of it as hauntingly as John Lee Hooker sang of it. In 1938 Mitchell was hired by Harold Ross as a staff writer for the New Yorker, though his first contribution to the magazine had been published in 1933. He took up with writers like Philip Hamburger, S.J. Perelman and James ...”

“... for example, a head as simple as a bean seed.) Later there were American connections – in 1916 John Quinn began collecting his work; he knew the photographers Edward Steichen and Man Ray – and Romanian connections, which were maintained all his life. There is hardly a significant name which does not turn up in some context or other, from Picasso and the ...”

“... chest, turn engagingly puce, and roar ‘I am a Viking’ before destroying Geoff Capes, Grizzly Brown and all comers at the who-can-turn-over-most-cars-in-sixty-seconds contest. It may be only at the level of Raquel Welch, the leather bikini and One Million Years BC, but Old Norse literature and mythology has made its mark on European and American culture ...”

“... justice, tax evasion, squandering public money and undermining democracy. Once the Burrell and Brown/ Havlik trials collapsed, the finger pointed directly at the Sovereign herself, who emerged (depending on one’s preferred theory) as Machiavellian, culpably misinformed, vindictive or simply gaga. Whatever the explanation, the upshot is a mighty waste of ...”

“... and then their grey successors. We were so happy when those fresh-faced challengers, the Blair/Brown and Clinton/Gore double acts, showed them the door. People smarter than I was probably foresaw the compromises that would follow, but I doubt any of us fully anticipated our financialised, deregulated world – a world in which we now individually struggle ...”

“... on disability benefit, so they wouldn’t show up in unemployment figures. In the early 1990s, John Major’s secretary of state for social security, Peter Lilley, began to focus on Invalidity Benefit, or, as he called it, ‘bad back benefit’. Announcing his intention to close down ‘the something-for-nothing society’ at the Conservative Party ...”

“... Chanler clan, in the late 19th century, included II orphaned siblings maternally descended from John Jacob Astor. The eldest orphan had eight children, one of whom married Stanford White’s only child Lawrence. This Chanler lady, if you remember, became ‘Mama’ – Lessard’s grandmother with the second-generation liquid jewel/wine face. The Chanlers ...”

“... are also more than usually absurd. Look at those silly clips of Paddy Ashdown playing hopscotch or John Major on his knees in a day-nursery or Tony Blair in his Newcastle soccer-strip. Who do these people think they’re fooling? Why don’t they treat us as grown-ups? What’s happened to the issues? To this, the politicians might retort: where did those ...”

“... with angina. He was probably deterred from making this known by fear for his revered teacher, John Hunter, who was already suffering from the condition and was shortly to die of it. The irascible Hunter was said to have keeled over during an argument with a colleague. ‘My life is in the hands of any fool who cares to upset me,’ he had said awhile ...”

“... he consider oil availability as the crucial factor for economic growth. In any case, as William Brown asserts in a complementary chapter, ‘very little in the history of energy allows confidence to be placed in statements about long-term future developments’ and as yet unrecognised unconventional sources of energy may well emerge. Meanwhile, the case for ...”

“... of Amaral’s colourised photographs, this time of Lewis Powell, one of the men who conspired with John Wilkes Booth to assassinate Lincoln, and who on the same night made a savage attempt on the life of his secretary of state, William H. Seward. The shoppers were asked when they thought it had been taken. Powell is leaning against the pocked metal of his cell ...”

“... year it reopened after a two-year refurbishment. The west front of Desmoulin’s building, its brown-gold façades in anodised aluminium, panelled and pierced to create a varying effect in changing light, give Cluny a newly confident presence, allowing it to face ‘smilingly’, as Desmoulin puts it, onto the Boulevard Saint-Michel. This for him is a ...”

“... were first precipitated from a universal ocean. Hutton’s prose was opaque, but his champion John Playfair ensured that the wider world appreciated his message. Not long afterwards, William ‘Strata’ Smith produced the first good geological map, using characteristic fossils as guides to rock formations. After some difficulties in getting the map ...”

“... of unionist tradition. Only in the 1970s would this harden into Thatcher’s and, later, Brown’s caricatures of Britishness. Kidd tends to ascribe these traits to Scottish reasonableness, a willingness to compromise that preceded the rise of the tougher political nationalism of today’s SNP. This may endear his book to defenders of Brownite or ...”