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“... handler, Alexander Feklisov, published his memoirs over the objections of the Russian intelligence service. He was a decorated Hero of the Russian Federation, credited in Moscow with having helped resolve the Cuban Missile Crisis: he figured they’d let him get away with it, and, if not, he was at the end of his life anyway. Sebba may be right that his ...”

“... War and State Departments. A month later Donovan submitted his ‘Memorandum of Establishment of Service of Strategic Information’ to the president. It recommended an organisation that would collect and analyse information and make it available to the president as commander-in-chief, and would also disseminate propaganda. It made no mention of covert ...”

“... he went along. During the war, Trevor-Roper worked in intelligence, at first in the Radio Security Service. This outfit initially fell under MI8 but was later transferred to the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) and its huge Ultra decrypting operation at Bletchley. Sisman fills two long chapters with the intricate, sometimes ...”

“... Glasgow, Greenock and Helensburgh in the summer of Napoleon’s advance on Moscow. In fact, Robert Fulton’s steamboat Clermont had started running on the Hudson in 1807, and in the five years before Bell got going on the Clyde half a dozen other steamers had begun to carry freight and passengers on the Delaware, the St Lawrence, the Mississippi and ...”

“... when he and my stepmother were moving house. The coins were in the top pocket of his National Service uniform, which went in the skip, along with a little glass duck that he kept retrieving but finally relinquished when we insisted it wasn’t worth keeping. It kept bobbing to the surface, and I began to feel guilty, so I saved it. Other things have found ...”

“... and scandal, Maintenant was entirely written and published by Cravan: the other contributors (Robert Miradique, W. Cooper, E. Lajeunesse, Marie Lowitska etc) are all pseudonyms. Even the advertisements bear his skewed imprint: the restaurant Chez Jourdain entices customers with the words, ‘Where can you see Van Dongen’ – the Flemish painter Kees van ...”

“... I knelt and started to pray and prayed for everybody I thought of, Brett and Mike and Bill and Robert Cohn and myself, and all the bullfighters, separately for the ones I liked, and lumping all the rest, then I prayed for myself again, and while I was praying for myself I found I was getting sleepy, so I prayed that the bullfights would be good, and that ...”

“... thistle. The poem’s starting-point is a critique of the cult of the ultimate Scots lyric poet, Robert Burns, who has become a justification in his native land for permanently excluding ideas, politics, and everything but sentiment and banal platitudes, from poetry. All his major poetry from A drunk man onward aims at an inclusiveness that resists ...”

“... ambitions, Toole wrote A Confederacy of Dunces in the early Sixties, while doing his national service in Puerto Rico. The manuscript was submitted to Simon and Schuster, where Robert Gottlieb, after dickering for two years, eventually turned it down in 1966. By 1969 Toole was an English instructor at Dominican ...”

“... reference-points have always been overwhelmingly literary. Arnold Bennett, Virginia Woolf and Robert Louis Stevenson appear in the first, short, paragraph of this book, and Auden, James and Flaubert have all made their appearance before the end of the second page. Re-reading The Uses of Literacy now, one notices that a work usually recalled for its ...”

“... means or another. Despite the many who hated him, he died in bed. For I refer, of course, to Sir Robert Walpole, prime minister from 1722 to 1742, architect of the Whig supremacy, hammer of the Tories. His long tenure of power reminds us that Britain’s much-vaunted two-party system has in the past often given way in practice to something approximating to a ...”

“... well, since the tale is in substance almost unbearably violent and cruel, a manifestation of what Robert Frost calls ‘design of darkness to appal’. The central figure, Yoshihide, is a painter, a wholly disagreeable man who loves only two things: his art and his daughter. The daughter is a Lady-in-Waiting to the Grand Lord of Horikawa, whose particular ...”

“... to the absence of the Cabinet as a stabilising force and to the politicisation of the Civil Service, especially at Number 10’. She knew she’d known what she said she hadn’t when she shouldn’t, and the morning before facing the House, agreed that she might be finished. (A colleague had dismissed Michael Heseltine as ‘the sort of chap who has to ...”

“... superior brain. The Second World War interrupted and leavened his student politics, active service providing its own kind of filter. Afterwards, he returned to university, became president of the Union, wrote a few articles on economics, inherited the college fellowship of his tutor, Robert Hall, taught (inter ...”

“... out applause and ramming it through. No wonder the Liberals, and the Pan-Africanists under Robert Sobukwe, were appalled: a room full of black people had cheered the Charter through and felt empowered in the process, but a small number of white Communists had run the thing from start to finish. The Congress was their idea, they had organised it; the ...”