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“... goes like clockwork – no problems, no mistakes – though there’s a twist at the end. Simon Mann’s Cry Havoc might seem like a copy of this scenario – same place, roughly the same plot, thirty years later – but it’s much more fun because Mann’s attempted coup turned out to be, in his words, ‘a ...”

“... up in palatial style here but so did Spencer’s ex-friend the convicted fraudster Darius Guppy; Simon Mann, the leader of the attempted mercenary coup in Equatorial Guinea in 2004; and Teodorin Nguema, the playboy son of the Equatoguinean dictator, Obiang Nguema, whom Mann was trying to overthrow. It was Thatcher’s ...”

“... version he goes to his death with the words ‘Floreat Etona!’ on his lips (as, one imagines, Simon Mann would have done if things had gone badly for him in Equatorial Guinea). True, Hook could have been an oik trying to make an impression, but at least he had the Latin, and in swordsmanship he fought and died by the rules. Some of Peter Leeson’s ...”

“... alleged 2004 attempt by a group of South African mercenaries, led by the British ex-SAS officer Simon Mann, to overthrow the government of Equatorial Guinea. Even within the confines of Scahill’s theme, there are frustrating omissions. He writes about how much higher the daily pay of Blackwater guards in Iraq is than the pay of regular US troops, and ...”

“... and led to the arrest of Mark Thatcher in South Africa and the jailing of the British mercenary Simon Mann in Zimbabwe. Shaxson toys with the idea that the US (and possibly Spain and Britain) encouraged the attempted coup. The US would have had good reason to welcome a change of regime. Obiang’s son, Teodoro Nguema, owns an airline, a large timber ...”

“... the end of the first chapter, when the full roll-call of his name is solemnly performed: General Simon Jose Antonio de la Santisima Trinidad Bolivar y Palacios. Simon Bolivar for short. Bolivar was born in 1783, in Caracas, to wealthy aristocratic parents. He studied in Spain, fervently read Rousseau, witnessed ...”

“... just a matter of investment, technology and productivity. They were also, in the words of Simon Kuznets, about ‘the future prospect of underdeveloped countries within the orbit of the free world’.Walt Rostow, who was, along with Kuznets, one of the field’s most influential early thinkers, understood growth as the foundation of the postwar world ...”

“... a lot of people into thinking that everything would eventually work out OK. In 1955 the economist Simon Kuznets put forward the hypothesis that became the basis for the enormously influential ‘Kuznets curve’: ‘The long swing in income inequality must be viewed as part of a wider process of economic growth,’ through which ‘the dynamic forces ...”

“... his excellent television programmes. But thanks to some of the cooks cited in his bibliography – Simon Hopkinson, say, whose Roast Chicken and Other Stories (Ebury, £16.99) is a founding text of contemporary cookbook-writing, or Fergus Henderson, whose St John restaurants trained many of London’s newish wave of serious chefs – and to his and Gill’s ...”

“... the talk, not the other way round. This is the characteristic mode of Proust and Musil and Mann, and of those writers from Bellow and Gaddis to Kundera and Norman Rush whose work is marked more by continuity with modernism than by postmodern rupture. Following Bakhtin, we might call these dialogic novels, not just because there’s so much conversation ...”

“... is a long list of manifest frauds and charlatans, headed by Dostoevsky and Freud. Eliot is a fake, Mann no better. In one letter, out of compassion for Wilson, he explains in some detail why Malraux is a rotten writer; but Lawrence he simply jeers away, and when Wilson put him on to Faulkner he wrote back incredulously: ‘Are you pulling my ...”

“... to readers of the Sunday Times and the Spectator. Carey’s cousins in populism sometimes include Simon Jenkins, Paul Johnson, A.N. Wilson and the late Auberon Waugh. An easy moralism animates this worldview. Picasso was a pig; Edmund Gosse was ‘a bore’; D.H. Lawrence hit Frieda and wanted to exterm-inate whole races; Virginia Woolf was a pretentious snob ...”

“... observations which epitomise the art of film come in as asides, as when, writing about Michel Simon, he invokes ‘the special mingling of self and character that is so necessary (and dangerous) in screen acting’. (This, by the way, is a rewrite. In the previous edition it read: ‘the special mingling of self and character that is so hallucinatory in ...”

“... before and turned down an opportunity to meet General Ludendorff. Others were also worried: Thomas Mann noted that while ‘Wagner will never cease to interest me . . . Bayreuth as it now presents itself interests me not at all.’ Hamann reports every passion, tiff and row, every argument that took place over the hiring and firing of the great artists who ...”

“... science has never recovered. Individuals such as Arnold Schoenberg, Bertolt Brecht and Thomas Mann, along with cultural institutions like the Frankfurt School and the Bauhaus, benefited the countries to which they fled, leaving Germany a cultural desert. For Blackbourn​ , the origins of Nazism can be located not in the long run of German history, but in ...”