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“... That the ex-convicts had left the island for gold rushes in other countries. That only pure free white settler stock remained. Like all great lies there was some truth in these assertions . . . But at the end of the day most blackfellas and convicts remained on the island, sick with syphilis and sadness and fear and madness and loss. And when the long night ...”

“... region, a guide drove me to the place where Savimbi lived in the early 1990s. The dilapidated ‘White House’ is decked with lines of colourful clothes hung out to dry by squatters in its gutted interior. The city’s colonial buildings are dilapidated, their pastel façades scarred by shrapnel, and crumbling factories are all that remain of a once ...”

“... among ‘fucking queer intellectual bastards’. In no time he and Simon, dressed only in little white towels, are padding through a gay sauna near the Gare de Lyon in search of a young man called Hamed, to whom Barthes might have given a copy of the missing document. Hamed, they’ve been told, has a fringe and an earring, but the steam makes it hard to ...”

“... Through the words of Raimundo Dusa (the dandy and brother of the abducted Corrado Dusa) and Christopher Blake (an English journalist), and through an authorial account of Tomaso, one of the terrorists, Massie with great economy constructs a history of Italy since the war, the thirty, ostensibly prosperous years of Christian Democracy, the growth of ...”

“... is set down in a terse, almost shorthand style, we learn that Forster had been cruel as a cat to Christopher Isherwood the night before, that he had sucked up to Williams in a queenly manner and that, in the opinion of ‘The Bird’ (Vidal’s usual term for Tennessee’s person of plumage and flutter), he was an old gentleman ‘with urinestained ...”

“... to get a head start from that investigation. Mr Nussbaum had just been forced to resign as White House counsel, for his apparent role in muddying the inquiry into the death of Vince Foster. Thus, while a generalised amnesty for all crimes committed in office might have a short-term marginal utility for all serving politicians, it did look a touch ...”

“... never be said,’ sang one Victorian vicarage family in the isolation of their nursery. ‘Red, white and blue, dirty kangaroo, sitting on a lamp-post doing number two,’ was what we used to mutter in our Surrey back-garden. My great uncle, a Presbyterian minister, once told my father the rhyme that had so delighted him in his childhood in the 1860s, a ...”

“... Before 1922 Hugh MacDiarmid did not exist. And only Christopher Murray Grieve would have dared to invent him. Alan Bold’s valuable biography points out that when the 30-year-old Grieve began to write in the Scottish Chapbook under the pseudonym ‘M’Diarmid’, he was already editing the magazine under his own name, reviewing for it as ‘Martin Gillespie’, and employing himself as its Advertising Manager (and occasional contributor), ‘A ...”

“... shaved for several days. His wife was small and more stockily built, with a broad, open face and a white bonnet that made her eyes look dark and anguished. They fussed around me, thanking me before I even had time to stamp the snow out of my boots. ‘How long has she been ill?’ I asked. ‘She sickened for a short while,’ the wife said, ‘and fell into a ...”

“... reveries. In some ways, the middle-period novels that made him famous do the same, only better: White Noise (1985) is a non-stop sequence of witty routines with a more ingenuous straight man than usual and an uncharacteristically warm current of ‘eerie feeling’ for suburban family life. But slipping a few sugar cubes into his medicine bag isn’t the ...”

“... square the self-imposed American circle whereby the Palestinians pick a non-PLO delegation. And a White Paper has been issued in which the Jordanian position on the war (no foreign troops, a regional solution, the concept of linkage) is recalled with pride. Perhaps nowhere more than in Amman does the emptiness and nastiness of Desert Storm seem more ...”

“... in a uniform; what Henry Kissinger used to call (referring demurely to himself) ‘the man on the white horse’? For the Spencer girl, I carry an even sharper blade in my heart. All that rehearsal and all that pre-publicity, with the publicity getting publicity, and then – nada. She revealed that she had been miserable to the point of puking. She disclosed ...”

“... One of these hollow and stuffed figures has been preselected as the next occupant of the White House, and I can’t think of a major donor who hasn’t already bet on both of them. Just to keep it interesting, you may read of an ‘insurgent’ down the road, who will also be a fully paid-up member of the same Beltway or Senatorial or think-tank ...”

“... resurrection rituals danced by the doomed Plains Indians when they realised that progress and white chicanery had undone them for ever. All this personal information is compressed into a mere couple of emotionally controlled pages out of 400. The rest is eye, ear and different kinds of curiosity: historical, technical, geographical. The result falls short ...”

“... The Cordon Bleu to the War is gone,     In the ranks of death you’ll find him. His snow-white apron is girded on     And his magic stove behind him. ‘Army beef,’ says the Cordon Bleu,     ‘Though a stupid bungler slays thee, One skilful hand thy steaks shall stew,     One artist’s pan shall braise thee.’ (That field ...”