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“... The series​ in which this volume appears constitutes the official historical record of American diplomacy. In 1989, the State Department published a volume with the same title as this one, nearly 1100 pages in length, which purported to document US-Iran relations in the early 1950s. In fact, focused as it was on the disputed nationalisation of Iranian oil and issues relating to prospective US economic and security assistance to Iran, the earlier volume essentially ignored the central episode of that period: the coup, engineered by the US and Britain, that ousted Mohammad Mossadegh, Iran’s democratically elected prime minister, from power ...”

“... on bringing out one new book after another, no matter how fine a steam rises from the dome of James Wood. (Writing in the New Republic, Wood welcomed Updike’s bestseller Terrorist into the world by wishing it had been aborted: ‘John Updike should have run a thousand miles away from this subject – at least as soon as he saw the results on the ...”

“... assigned to the ‘hedge fund overlord’, the ‘polo-playing playboy millionaire’, the ‘James Bond of the Russian oligarchy’, the ‘French luxury goods tycoon’ (also appearing as the ‘French luxury titan’), the ‘serial dater of supermodels’, and the ‘leveraged-buyout king’. The book is illustrated with photographs of de Pury’s ...”

“... in degenerates. You wouldn’t know him.’ She couldn’t have said the same to Philo Vance, S.S. Van Dine’s famous aesthete-sleuth – polo player, expert in Chinese ceramics, former student of William James – whom Raymond Chandler regarded as ‘the most asinine character in detective fiction’, and on some level ...”

“... were connected by marriage to other great Dutch colonial families: the Douws, the Ten Eycks, the Van Schaicks, the Van Vechtens, the Van Renssalaers. The values of their world are enshrined, satirised and lamented in Washington Irving’s History of New York. The Melvills had come to ...”

“... that they will go on strutting and preening and considering themselves eligible for what Clive James used to call ‘the grade A crumpet’ until at last senility takes hold. (In James’s phrase, Ford Madox Ford, himself neither young nor pretty, had the grade A crumpet ‘coming at him like kamikazes’.) Germaine ...”

“... workers we can no longer name to the early 16th-century masterpieces of Dürer (in Germany), Lucas van Leyden (in the Netherlands) and Marcantonio Raimondi working with Raphael (in Italy). As Sayer’s guide shows, the relationship between printing and drawing was rich. In The Compleat Drawing-Book, the print is a training tool for amateurs, but professional ...”

“... available and an exercise we went through both with The Madness of George III and The Lady in the Van partly to find out how long the play is likely to be and also to get some notion of what it’s about. And it is helpful, though painful and embarrassing too as some sections are far from finished, the characters scarcely sketched in and the plot often ...”

“... addresses the ‘immense darkness’ of the continent beyond. Another unnamed presence might be Mr James, whose list of the ‘items of high civilisation … absent from the texture of American life’ finds a counterpart in the hero’s observations. After mulling over James’s views in The Child that Books Built, Spufford ...”

“... know anyone is watching, can be caught ‘staring, eyes rimmed with flaking liner, mind off the hook’, her eyes with ‘something frightening and sad about them’. Sometimes, she forces her little sister to sing at strangers out of the window: ‘What do you want to make those eyes at me for/When they don’t mean what they say?’ – beaming ...”

“... first colonisers of the no longer distant Surrey hills were the painters Myles Birket Foster and James Hook. They were in the van of an easeled army. Charles O’Brien, the latest editor of the Surrey volume of The Buildings of England and an admirable successor to Nairn and Bridget Cherry, is on the money when he ...”

“... compiling lists, but the lists themselves are interesting. For example: Jean Renoir, Orson Welles, James Wong Howe, Dudley Nichols, Clifford Odets, Robert Rossen, John Garfield, Charlie Chaplin and Leo McCarey all attended a reception in July 1943 for the Soviet director and administrator Mikhail Kalatozov. At that time Russian and American propaganda methods ...”

“... authorities decide on the EDF bid. The European competition commissioner, the late Karel van Miert, refused, and soon afterwards issued an eight-page judgment clearing the EDF takeover. Ignoring EDF’s monopoly in France, he focused instead on the cross-Channel cable through which EDF already sold Britain a relatively small amount of power. Such a ...”

“... be warned off, kept at bay. I desired the hitherto unattainable – to be left alone: what Henry James once described as ‘uncontested possession of the long, sweet, stupid day’: that peace to which no living creature has a natural right. Yes, for a time I was decidedly neurotic on the subject of my friends. I even imagined a kinship with Dorothy ...”

“... from the Festival of Britain, the Dome of Discovery tricked out with bright yellow – ‘Van Gogh cornfield’ – cocktail sticks. Now I appreciated the concept of the Millennium Bug. Here it was, a white spider-crab quivering on the foreshore. A video-grab from Spielberg’s Close Encounters: an invertebrate alien protected by security ...”