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“... made, and he would subsequently find himself driven to even more exaggerated support for Blair and Brown. Why was the mesmeric trance so crucial, and why did it have to be maintained at all costs? Well, there was a lot behind it: something of the way of the world, as well as the investment of billions in pre-publicity, policemen and stadiums. The threatened ...”

“... simply got on the telephone from Bourges to their engineer at Bahia Blanca, Monsieur Hervé Colin, to explain to him in a seven-hour call how to marry a surface-to-surface Exocet to the wing of an aircraft, so today the French merrily continue to supply Argentina with the weapons themselves. To preserve the proprieties, they do it through Israel. But ...”

“... Berenson’s recorded utterances sound all too self-consciously sagacious. ‘Young John Carter Brown, who one day was to become director of the National Gallery of Art’, came with a plan ‘to prepare for a museum career by first taking a business course’. Berenson urged him to ‘look, look, look, until you are blind with looking, and out of blindness ...”

“... press. But on a literal level, In the Lake of the Woods has eerier parallels to the career of Colin Powell, the recently retired Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the man currently being groomed for an Ike-like run at the US Presidency. Powell’s career, particularly that part of it least examined by the primarily fawning mainstream press, went ...”

“... other and perhaps give the impression of cream, or pale sand. Its beak is black, its claws are brown; it has black wingtips and a dark streak leading from the back of each eye. Its legs are often described by observers as ‘milky-white’. In the early 19th century there was some experimenting with different names, among them the cream-coloured plover and ...”

“... in the early Sixties, it was Tennant’s ‘tabloid fate’ to be seen only as the sister of Colin, whose royal friendships made him an object of curiosity. In her most desperate attempt to get away from Princess Margaret she crosses the Atlantic. Here to her relief Tennant is not part of Society and gets in touch with the gritty realities of life by ...”

“... of Nicky, posing in his bathing trunks. When clothed, we learn, he wears ‘a denim jacket (brown, not blue), bearing my “I love paedophilia” badge. Dennis was taking me to the Reform Club for lunch ...’ Dennis is one of Nicky’s lovers, formerly his teacher at his boarding-school. ‘ “Kick us,” he murmured fondly as he knelt at my ...”

“... of black pelting down on two other mainstays of his palette, a bright flesh tint and a cow-dung brown. Everything became ragged, snatched, hollow. MaryAnne Stevens, the curator, wants to take Manet on via the genre of the portrait. It seems a backdoor approach. Portrait commissions mattered to Manet in the decade before his death, aged 51, in 1883, but ...”

“... possessed in the waking state.’In his small bedroom, Louis was haunted by a peculiar shade of brown, ‘something like that of sealskin’, and his dream-nature became part of his talent (he called these creative nightmares his ‘Brownies’). Night terrors of intimate brutality might be expected to hasten a delicate literary style, but in RLS’s case ...”

“... casualties is Saddam worth? And the answer is: not that damned many.’ In February 2001, I heard Colin Powell say that Saddam Hussein ‘has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbours.’ That same month, I heard that a CIA report stated: ‘We do not ...”

“... who worked in or close to Intelligence in the mid-Seventies – Peter Wright, Cathy Massiter and Colin Wallace – a substantial section of MI5 was working almost full time to disorientate the office, and subvert the political achievements, of Prime Minister Wilson, allegedly the one man in the country who could control them. What about the free ...”

“... distorted reflection [in a kettle this time] was puffy after their sleepless night, her chestnut-brown eyes bloodshot’). Don’t describe things from an unseeing point of view – there’s no such thing: ‘Ruth gazed out of her kitchen window over the crisp whiteness … at the abbey … and the panoramic view … Ruth saw none of ...”

“... the OPC’s better-known operations, such as the channelling – through an official called Irving Brown at the American Federation of Labor – of millions of dollars to the Corsican leader of the Marseille dockers, Pierre Ferri-Pisani, whose members would beat up Communists trying to disrupt the landing of aid, or the activities of the Congress for Cultural ...”

“... the staff lunch that allowed him to behave as ‘an encyclopedic egoist’, in his colleague Ivor Brown’s phrase, who drank large brandies and smoked big cigars and entertained a loyal audience that included the proprietor, the courtly Waldorf, and writers such as C.A. Lejeune, hired as film critic from the Manchester Guardian, and Joyce Grenfell, who as ...”

“... men, rebels without causes; we believe in the dynamism of the times ... Our culture heroes are not Colin Wilson and John Osborne, rather Floyd Patterson and Col. Pete Everest are more likely candidates for the title. Painful stuff, one imagines, for a man who knew what it was to be fashionable. Keith Vaughan had plenty of self-loathing, but more ...”