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“... began prosaically enough, with the News of the World’s revelation on 6 November 2005 that Prince William had strained his knee. Its source – William’s voicemail – didn’t make the scoop much more remarkable; British redtops had been listening in to royal phone calls for more than ten years, and earlier tap-and-tell ...”

“... war operated ‘in shades of black and white’ with clear-cut heroes and villains, whereas in his brand of history – which has become a kind of franchise, with this latest volume following his previous bestsellers, Agent Zigzag and Operation Mincemeat – the moral lines are more ‘blurred’ and complex. If Macintyre believes this, he has mistaken the ...”

“... had a part to play in the publicity campaigns which transformed a film director into a media brand. Jan Olsson has shown in great detail how Hitchcock consistently manipulated celebrity gossip in order to project the image of a creative genius who was as much ‘prankster’ as ‘master craftsman’. The biggest prank of all was his own body. Despite ...”

“... subsidise his publishing house, his magazine Poesia, and his campaign to position Futurism as the brand leader in avant-garde art movements. It was a friend of his father’s and a major shareholder in Le Figaro, Mohammed El Rachi, who negotiated the prominent positioning of his call to arms. The manifesto opens with a group of decadents staying up ...”

“... Clyde’s car near Grapevine on Easter Sunday. The papers immediately blamed Bonnie. A local man, William Schieffer, claimed that he saw a woman walk up to a wounded police officer and shoot him repeatedly while his head bounced on the road ‘like a rubber ball’. Bonnie’s murderous reputation was cemented. From now on, Guinn explains, she was seen as a ...”

“... state of Sarawak on Borneo as a private fiefdom in the mid-19th century, America produced its own brand of freebooters, including William Walker, the Tennessee doctor who conquered and ruled Nicaragua for ten months and decimated the population of Costa Rica.Until the end of the 19th century the US state was in no position ...”

“... Room and the Patient, a 1906 book which includes a reference to ‘anaesthetic tables’), William James, James Thomson, William Acton, Charles-Louis Philippe, W.R. Burnett (a crime novelist in whose High Sierra – published in 1940 – the phrase ‘She was … a one-night-stand type’ occurs), Edward Winslow ...”

“... the way Rilke or Jarry or Apollinaire did. (Never mind other teen crushes like Charlie Parker and William Burroughs, Frank O’Hara and Andy Warhol.) He felt like a poet with a capital P, writhing in the coils of Church and Satan, Evil and Beauty, Sin and Damnation. Which, God knows, all held plenty of allure for a sulky, half-Catholic male adolescent. But ...”

“... he had, Hemingway did not serve in the Italian Army. It was about this time, we are told, that William Faulkner wore a Royal Canadian Air Force officer’s uniform with wings, and cultivated a limp, to none of which he was entitled. All this may sound very silly, but war is a great breeder of lies and the young Hemingway was behaving like a lot of other ...”

“... of MOOCs. Or so many of his later readers argued, as they stabbed his book with their bent nibs. William Warburton, who saw hieroglyphs as a primitive rather than profound form of writing, found it ‘pleasant’ to watch Kircher ‘labouring through half a dozen folios with the writings of late Greek Platonists, and the forged books of Hermes, which contain ...”

“... member of the super-rich elite supported repeal. There were some who hated the idea, including William Gates Sr (father of Bill), Steven Rockefeller, George Soros and Warren Buffet. What is more, the Democratic Party was squarely against the proposal, and wanted to prevent it. Given that the alliance that had been formed to push repeal through was so ...”

“... connections, Bute was decried as the new Highland adventurer. It did not help that another Scot, William Murray, Lord Mansfield, who was dogged by the smear that he was intent on importing Scots Romanist principles into the English common law, had become lord chief justice in 1756. Might Bute and his Scotch cronies find no better use for Magna Carta, English ...”

“... of Eeyore-ism, ‘my Muse of national demise’. He can sound sometimes like the hero of Ibsen’s Brand, which he translated for the National Theatre, a ferocious moralist whose diatribe is at once thrilling and appalling: ‘This entire Age is devoid/of grace or merit;/it’s ruled by creeping pride,/dull frivolity,/meanness of spirit.’ This lament at the ...”

“... was not the only contemporary to wonder in retrospect at the Auden effect – what the painter William Coldstream called ‘a real magic and glamour in his presence’ – and shrewdly put his finger on part of it: the figure Auden cut was at once impressive and comical, as though acting out some great running joke about authority or seriousness. He strode ...”