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“... The supply of stories has perhaps been the American West’s only reliable bounty. The difficult thing has been finding people to notice them, let alone tell them well. The Indian wars, still unfinished as tribes continue to struggle for rights, territory and cultural survival; the resource rushes, the Gold Rush in particular, which turned San Francisco into a cosmopolitan city standing alone in the wilderness; the once astonishingly abundant salmon runs that sustained soil and trees, as well as birds, bears and humans; the timber wars; the rangeland wars; the radical labour and environmental movements; the attitudes people adopted towards a harsh, unfamiliar, often sublime landscape; the evolution of European cultures in a non-European terrain and the arrival of Asian and Latin American immigrants to shape a hybrid culture: all these have had their occasional historians, though most Americans were raised to believe that history happened somewhere else ...”

“... what Stanford calls ‘a rousing hymn of classless patriotism at a time of national emergency’. (Rebecca West commented more tartly that it was ‘the East Mediterranean edition of the Farmers’ Weekly … two thousand years out of date’.) The translation sold more than 11,000 copies, an index of the general appetite for reading-matter during the war ...”

“... The West began at the pay phone at the gas station at Lee Vining, the little town next to Mono Lake on the east side of the Sierra Nevada, too remote for cell phones. I was standing around in the harsh golden light at eight thousand feet waiting to make a call when I realised that the man on the line was trying to patch up his marriage, and the task wasn’t going to be quick or easy ...”

“... world had more or less run their course and liberal capitalist countries were also in trouble. The West responded with Thatcherism and Reaganism; in Eastern Europe – Yugoslavia, Poland and Hungary in particular – economic reforms were at different stages, with economists proposing a variety of ways in which to break free of centralised control and reap the ...”

“... was killed by a second heart attack. He was 44. His body was taken to a cheap mortuary on West Washington Boulevard. ‘There lay American genius [and] not a soul was in the room,’ the journalist Frank Scully wrote in his book Rogues’ Gallery: Profiles of My Eminent Contemporaries. ‘Except for one bouquet of flowers and a few empty chairs, there ...”

“... her and said how much she adored her books. It turned out she had mistaken her for Antonia Ridge. Rebecca West did recognise her and said: ‘ “My dear, you must meet a friend of mine from S. Africa who is DYING to meet you.” So I was duly introduced to a lady who was indeed dying to meet me, not because she’d read so much as one word I’d ...”

“... beer, which spilled off when he took the corners too fast. He drove us out to a place called West Meadow Beach on Long Island’s North Fork. The bungalow had been lent to us out of pity. My mother had just been murdered, and my father had been left alone with six teenage children.’ No coincidence saves Hayden and her siblings, who, twenty years ...”

“... the financial basis for the commuter train. It means that San Francisco, capital of the west from the Gold Rush to some point in the 20th century when Los Angeles overshadowed it, is now a bedroom community for the tech capital of the world at the other end of the peninsula. There are advantages to being an edge, as California long was, but Silicon ...”

“... John Philby and Robert Byron, of Norman Douglas and Patrick Leigh-Fermor, of R.W.Seton-Watson and Rebecca West. Sorties farther afield – like Peter Fleming’s expeditions to the Gobi or Matto Grosso – were fewer. Paradoxically, the vast expanse of the Empire itself was not fertile soil for this kind of writing. There, British power was too close at ...”

“... a desire to leave. Fear of ostracism sometimes outweighs fear of radiation. Disasters in the West are often compounded by the belief that human beings instantly revert to savagery in a calamity, with the result that the focus shifts from rescue to law enforcement and the protection of property, as it did recently in Haiti and New Orleans, and in San ...”

“... but they threaten the survival of more fragile species. One of the still-endangered species of the West Coast is the Snowy Plover, and by 1995 ravens were plundering more than two-thirds of their eggs on the seashore north of San Francisco, as well as raiding nests of other at-risk species. They have been observed preying on Bank Swallows in the Bay Area and ...”

“... pictures.Reviewers were not slow to allocate Waugh’s novels a place within what his friend Rebecca West called ‘the contemporary literature of disillusion’, a modern tradition supposedly inaugurated by The Waste Land – the poem from which Waugh took the title of one of his best novels, A Handful of Dust (1934). Waugh certainly shared with ...”

“... asked is: ‘What was Camilla Parker Bowles like?’ He could do worse than refer the curious to Rebecca Tyrrel’s book. Born on 17 July 1947 (she is 16 months older than Prince Charles), Camilla is the daughter of an army major, Bruce Shand, and a society hostess, the Honourable Rosalind Shand (née Cubitt). Her paternal grandfather, P. Morton Shand, was ...”

“... During​ the 1860s Rebecca Williams, née Tuggay, worked in Bath as a laundress. Six days a week, for twelve hours or more, she whitened the soiled linens of the city’s fashionable residents and visitors. Her work began at dawn on Mondays with the collecting, sorting, marking, soaking, cleaning and mangling of the wash ...”

“... is very responsive, and it’s the only occasion in my experience that the lesson (Timothy West and Ecclesiastes) is given a round of applause. The best speech, regrettably, is David Frost’s, the best anecdote that Ned, questioned about the young man he had brought with him to supper, said: ‘If pressed, I would have to say he’s a Spanish ...”