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“... playing games with decades is a relatively harmless activity, although best done (as by Norman Shrapnel) chiefly for amusement. An eccentric eye will always spot the eccentricities of the times, and Shrapnel possesses also a sharp pair of scissors for the newspaper cutting. Snip and you have, for example, the ...”

“... across my father’s face as he looks around the table. His widow’s peak is pulled down like a Norman helmet. His eyes are shrapnel. His irises are wearing little white spectacles of bacon fat to examine my plate. He tells me it’s rude to push my food around, making dams out of mashed potato when other people are ...”

“... over her and the car jounced. Grates, gutters, clawed in the backwash. She kept going. Flak and shrapnel Of thundercracks hit the walls and roofs. Still a swimmer She bobbed off, into sea-smoke Where headlights groped. That’s the way to deal with a royal christening: the blest water on the infant prince’s brow metamorphosed into a devout ...”

“... and that Lois herself had been a high-school supporter of the Socialist Party of America under Norman Thomas and perhaps, at university, an admirer of the young militants whose star rose in the party during the early 1930s. Lois sends a funny letter to her family in December 1936, responding to ‘Mother’s crack that she was sorry I was a ...”

“... Broadway theatre, not to see a play but to enjoy what was meant to be a thrilling contest between Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal. The place was packed; except for those sponsored by some publisher, the audience had bought very expensive tickets, and they displayed a keenness more appropriate to a prizefight. Indeed a prizefight was what they expected, Mailer ...”

“... Machine-guns open up like buzz-saws, flares crackle, rockets fizz, shells screech and suck air. Shrapnel – here Holland quotes Ernie Pyle – ‘tinkled and clattered down upon the rocks around us with a ringing metallic sound’. We are prompted to imagine the smell of cordite, rubber, diesel, burnt flesh.Mechanised warfare still seemed so unnatural that ...”

“... of Britain’s diminished position after the Second. Macmillan was in intermittent pain from the shrapnel the Germans had left in his thigh forty years earlier; Harry Crookshank, Churchill’s first minister of health, had had his balls shot off on the Western Front. No man alive has lunched more politicians and permanent secretaries or scoured more Cabinet ...”

“... minutes. (Apparently, the spikes from the crown of an eight-inch Statue of Liberty make ideal shrapnel.) Booth’s website, terminalcornucopia.com, includes a video of him firing a breech-loading shotgun made from a deodorant aerosol, cans of Red Bull, nine volt batteries, tape, dental floss, tin foil, a hairdryer, a fridge magnet clip, and a condom. The ...”