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“... of autobiography, and 900 boxes of letters, speeches and papers to the University of East Anglia. John Peyton, the author of this Life, was Transport Minister from 1970 to 1974. Most of the research work into bombing that I quoted at the beginning is taken from Zuckerman’s autobiography rather than Peyton’s. Neither man makes much sense of the big ...”

“... started off with: ‘And we are standing on a historical platform today, because on this very heath took place the great debates that made this country a democracy.’ There were two, three thousand people at that rally, and I think that was the first time I’d heard a political leader giving the audience a history lesson. In 1967 I went to North Vietnam ...”

“... one or two good anecdotes, to illustrate his points. There is the tale of Hazlitt’s fight with John Lamb, in the course of a dispute about Holbein and Vandyke. I will quote the version in Benjamin Haydon’s journal: ‘They both became so irritated, they upset the card-table, and seized each other by the throat. In the struggle that ensued, Hazlitt got a ...”

“... claimed to have seen Macbeth and Banquo ‘riding through a wood’, rather than a ‘blasted heath’, before meeting ‘three women fairies’ at the beginning of Macbeth. There is nothing in Shakespeare’s text to indicate any such spectacle; and Barton thinks that, in all likelihood, Forman’s vivid imagination was simply transposing onto the Globe ...”

“... take over the Observer and Today newspapers, was once denounced by a Tory Prime Minister, Edward Heath, as ‘the unacceptable face of capitalism’. Tom Bower has now written books about both men which prove both charges a hundred times over. Maxwell was so infuriated by Bower’s book that he spent hundreds of thousands of pounds to stop it appearing and ...”

“... of photography and sound recording) adds further terminological lubrication. In his earlier book John Donne, Undone (1986) Docherty poured scorn on Eliot’s theory of ‘dissociation of sensibility’ in 17th-century poetry, a theory which – so far as Donne was concerned – Eliot in any case quickly abandoned. Docherty’s ‘modern age’ is a vague ...”

“... the cover, their faded marbled fronts transformed into a bookish reliquary. This was the material John Middleton Murry mined for the selections he called the Journal and the Scrapbook, though it’s long been known that there was no such distinction. Margaret Scott, who is also co-editor of the five-volume Mansfield Collected Letters, has worked for years on ...”

“... the Central Policy Review Staff should rise from the ashes of that body, which was created by Mr Heath to brief Cabinet and Cabinet committees, but which went into decline and was put out of its misery by Mrs Thatcher after the 1983 Election. Son of CPRS would have greater resources and an enhanced role, especially in the annual public expenditure survey; it ...”

“... articulate. And while it’s an effective instrument for joshing Belgians or people from Haywards Heath, his good-natured humour is unsuited to satire: the fangs look out of place. When England, England’s dastardly tycoon is unmasked as one of those people who like to dress up as babies and be fondled by buxom ‘nurses’ – while emitting, in this ...”

“... Westminster system. The academic jurist and political theorist Neil MacCormick – son of John MacCormick, the founding father of Scottish nationalist politics – began to explore the limits of sovereignty in an era of international organisations, intergovernmental blocs, regional subsidiarity and cross-border co-operation. With the arrival of ...”

“... it had been destroyed.As it turned out, however, there was much more to come. In the late 1970s, John Marks, a journalist who specialised in intelligence matters, filed a Freedom of Information request that uncovered a trove of 16,000 documents, most of which hadn’t been sent for shredding because they were filed as financial records. In the course of ...”

“... the aristocratic Calthorpe Estate, which was still tending it carefully as late as the 1960s, when John Madin was commissioned to design by far the best modernist housing in the city for the area. Other social improvement plans have grown out of it: Edgbaston adjoins Aston Webb’s overripe Victorian university buildings, and is close to the rangier, folksier ...”

“... such as Michael Portillo and Peter Lilley and a strange breed of suburban Brylcreem boys – John Moore, Kenneth Baker, Jeffrey Archer and, pre-eminently, Cecil Parkinson. What they have in common is a dreadful smarminess, a smoothly blatant insincerity which apparently nothing can puncture – Baker’s own recent memoirs are one long purr of bland ...”

“... Of those that remain, Joshua Reynolds, the Shakespearian scholar Malone and the politician John Courtenay are affectionate and supportive. These were the years, as we occasionally have to remind ourselves, when his Life of Johnson was completed, put to press, published, relished and extolled. This does less for him than might have been ...”

“... William Maginn, and the painter Daniel Maclise. Though the rumours put an end to her engagement to John Forster in 1835, nothing surfaced that she and her friends could not refute or explain away, and once she was dead, and in such a manner, the scandals faded into the background. It was said that she died of an accidental overdose, of tropical disease, that ...”