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“... The last word of the novel recalls Conrad. The Heart of Darkness is, however, a risky model. As Paul Theroux’s The Mosquito Coast and Coppola’s Apocalypse Now suggest, its invoked presence can leach the life out of any presumptuous rewriting, converting it into so much anaemic homage. Graham Greene tells us that in his apprentice days he found The Heart ...”

“... corresponds exactly to Raban’s personal distress in the opening chapter), they find Jimmy Carter too weak, too small, too fearful a hero: ‘just a real scared man’. In America now, all quests are defective, all heroes unequal to their task. Worst of all are the heroes Raban hears praised most often: complacent naysayers like Ronald Reagan with his ...”

“... a dizzying but pleasurable succession of meetings with his circle of intimates – Walter Berry, Paul Bourget, Abbé Mugnier, Ralph and Lisa Curtis, Madame de Cossé-Brissac, Rosa Fitz-James (“the best hostess I have ever known”), and Philomène de Lévis-Mirepoix – all members of the fashionable upper crust of cosmopolitan Paris.’ Was there no one ...”

“... Lange and Arthur Rothstein, folklorists working for the Library of Congress, the economist Paul Taylor, the sociologist Carey McWilliams, and even Woodie Guthrie, who provided the words and music. The migrants were ‘plain-folks’, patriotic Americans, individualistic, distrustful of big government and big solutions to their problems, Shindo ...”

“... spending their days drinking, napping and awaking fitfully to pursue such marginal offenders as Carter’s Little Liver Pills. Mostly the supposed regulators cavorted with the heads of the industries they were supposed to be supervising – the familiar Washington pattern that incensed Nader. He embarked on an extended honeymoon with the press and ...”

“... of the money stock) for the purposes of monetary policy, and then, in August 1979, President Jimmy Carter appointed Paul Volcker as chairman of the Fed.When Volcker was appointed, the federal funds rate (the Fed’s primary policy tool, the rate at which banks lend to each other) was 11 per cent; by June 1981 it was 22 per ...”

“... home from work until [his horse] Tabby was comfortable for the night,’ recalled the niece of one carter at the Coventry Station goods depot. Another man there would ‘bike out into the country, go down in the hedgerow, pull out my knife … And I’d cut a big, juicy faggot of dandelions. I’d stand by the stable door and shout “CHARLIE! Charlie! Come ...”

“... to never quite spelling things out. My own list would include Powell and Pressburger, Nic Roeg, Paul Nash, Derek Jarman, Anna Kavan, as well as under-celebrated British surrealist painters like Ithell Colquhoun and Emmy Bridgwater. This art revels in the threshold places, the hidden rivers and eerie copses of the British landscape.5 At first it may feel ...”

“... shop and showroom on Wimpole Street for more appreciative clients (Rubinstein had refused to pay), Paul and Marjorie Abbatt, the pioneering educational toy manufacturers. The materials, abundant high-quality plywood and full-height glazing, as well as the subtlety of the scale and detail of the interiors, demonstrated Goldfinger’s increasingly sure ...”

“... were more restrained, looking like European art-house fiction. Congress featured a drawing by Paul Klee. The boy wasn’t fooled: the crazy titles of the two books with ‘tasteful’ covers were enticing enough.‘Will you buy me these?’His grandmother scowled. It was not enough that the boy be bookish: he should be the right kind of bookish. ‘All ...”

“... In November​ 2017, Marc Gabolde, an Egyptologist at Paul Valéry University in Montpellier, received a grainy photograph on his phone from a colleague attending the opening party for the Louvre Abu Dhabi. The picture showed a pink granite stele on display at the museum. Had Gabolde seen it before? If not, what did he think? The stele was dated to 1327 BCE and came from Abydos, a sacred city on the upper banks of the Nile ...”

“... rows in front of me all in a row were Kissinger, Nelson Rockefeller, Ladybird, Ford, Mrs Carter and Mondale. Somehow these political stars all seem to be like dwarfs when you see them in the flesh. However, I had a wonderful suite at the Shoreham and everybody seemed to use Tanqueray in the Dry Martinis.’ He wrote to writers whom he admired. To ...”

“... the scene in The Blues Brothers where Jake and Elwood arrive at a swanky restaurant called Chez Paul to try and persuade their old trumpet player, Mr Fabulous, to rejoin the band. ‘From the start,’ Klein writes, ‘it was obvious that Woody was going to be in rare form that night. He swooped down on the hors d’oeuvres and gathered clumps of them in ...”

“... and sequencing. This approach comes close to that of a quick-eared anthologist, like Angela Carter in her Book of Fairy Tales, where she manages to give fresh meanings to stale misogynist topoi simply by framing and grouping the tales under subheadings such as ‘Good Girls and Where It Gets Them’ and ‘Strong Minds and Low Cunning’. Angels ...”

“... The message that the bomb had saved a million American lives, in the words of the historian Paul Ham, ‘put the American mind at ease, [and] slipped into folklore’. When, in 1994, the Smithsonian Institution announced plans to exhibit Enola Gay, the B-29 bomber which had destroyed Hiroshima, along with contextual commentary casting doubt on the ...”