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“... dared to write congratulating Leavis on his CH (‘Dead Sea fruit’, said his wife). Boris Ford was accused of killing Scrutiny off by stealing its contributors for the Penguin Guide to English Literature. Few friends, however loyal, escaped. Wilfrid Mellers, H.A. Mason and others all fell foul of him in one way or another. As to his enemies, the ...”

“... model for the first of the parables, ‘From the Republic of Conscience’, was an American poem, Richard Wilbur’s ‘Shame’. As for Harvard itself, his remarks about it are funny, fair and consistent with my memories of his teaching: in selecting the students for his classes, ‘what I wanted was evidence of their artistic doings’ rather than ‘the ...”

“... culture, to the press, to advertising. Hilliard is particularly good on the influence of Leavis on Richard Hoggart, even studying the logs of Hoggart’s extramural classes to find him imitating Leavis’s classes at Downing. Hoggart would incur the wrath of fellow Leavisites when he set up the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham ...”

“... library, now in the British Library: it depicts the Battle of Gisors in 1198 between the armies of Richard I of England and Philip II.The chroniclers’ shaping of the public perception of these kings, and their construction of a particular kind of history of the dynasty, is an underlying, if undeveloped, theme of Firnhaber-Baker’s book. The vivid character ...”

“... historical and autobiographical questions and then hares off to tackle the former. This means that Richard Evans had an untilled field before him. Based on unrestricted access to Hobsbawm’s personal archive, this is one of those doorstopper biographies that can get published in Britain even when the subject is a historian. It clocks in at 662 pages of text ...”

“... going on was Dick Cheney, a close friend and confidant of Bush’s from their days together in the Ford administration. In 1976, in the aftermath of the Church Committee’s inquiry into CIA abuses, standing intelligence committees had been set up in both the Senate and the House, charged with holding the CIA and other intelligence agencies to account. But it ...”

“... were didactic – ‘one of the things they were about was the indisposability of plastic.’ Richard Deacon, who is with Cragg ‘the most expensive, the most written about, the best patronised ... of the new British sculptural establishment’, makes startling hybrids: ‘To produce one of his small sculptures an old brass navigational aid must have ...”

“... could be the difference between being a statistic in a Channel 4 filler and being reincarnated by Richard Burton. Only losers leave their stories to the East London Advertiser and the more literate class of probation officer. Take that McVicar. He was totally out of order. An armed robber, ‘one of the top men of his profession’ (Lambrianou), he blew all ...”

“... hospital supplies for the American Fund for the French Wounded. They drove around in a Model T Ford, which they named ‘Auntie’. Stein had a habit of ‘talking and forgetting about driving’. When Toklas told her they were on the wrong road, she responded: ‘Wrong or right, this is the road and we are on it.’ Their taste for eccentric clothing ...”

“... whether CIA agents were above the law – ‘the king’s personal staff’, as the CIA director Richard Helms called them – or, like all other Americans, subject to the constitution. In the end the Church committee found no smoking assassins’ guns but, as Hersh says, the powers that be employed ‘lots of euphemisms – “who will rid me of this ...”

“... arrived in New York; he was greeted as a hero.Among the friends he made in America was Patrick Ford, the editor of the Irish World, a newspaper with a circulation of 125,000. In 1876, Ford and O’Donovan Rossa set up what they called ‘a skirmishing fund’ to assist in the planning and carrying out of a bombing ...”

“... No Wit depends. For Shakespeare, the theatre could stand for deceit or shallow imposture, as in Richard III’s antics or Antony’s ‘excellent dissembling’; but it was just as likely to suggest the possibility of more profound psychological transformations, as in the elusiveness of Bottom’s dream or Cleopatra’s mysterious ‘becomings’. Not so in ...”

“... apparent eagerness to wage nuclear war. Their campaign had a considerable impact, and when Richard Nixon got to the White House four years later he was convinced that scientists were a dangerously anti-Republican political lobby. Nixon shut down the Office of Science and Technology, and kicked the presidential science adviser out of the cabinet – an ...”

“... Fukuyama has arrived at a similar conclusion, and among fictional characters, the heroine of Richard Condon’s novel The Final Addiction. Like them, Fisher insists that the ingenuity of global capitalism now flows into all the interstices of out lives, and that, with its sublime new products, it will revolutionise all our former assumptions. He declares ...”

“... for his deviousness and dishonesty, remarkable for his complex and psychotic personality. Ford was an accident, an afterthought President who had little opportunity to demonstrate that those who described him as being without either ability or personality were wrong. Carter was inexperienced, unpredictable and weak. Reagan, even for his loyal ...”