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“... biography, do I. Will Rogers was billed as ‘America’s Greatest Humorist’, the successor to Mark Twain. But the legendary examples of his humour – ‘We are the first nation in the history of the world to go to the poorhouse in an automobile’; ‘My epitaph: Here lies Will Rogers. Politicians turned honest and he starved to death’ – sound flat ...”

“... scope. But by 1925 the General Strike brought the BBC up against the Government, or rather against Winston Churchill, since Baldwin did not support him in his attempt to take over the Company (which is what it then was) as an extension of the British Gazette, the sole medium of communication between the Government and the people. The independence that Reith ...”

“... film, the petty criminal played by Belmondo, modelled his self-image on that of Humphrey Bogart in Mark Robson’s The Harder They Fall. These films were not even ‘classics’ – they were little-regarded films dating from the mid-Fifties, movies which Andrew Sarris, a leading historian of Hollywood, later characterised as ‘widely reviled’ and ...”

“... hardly alone ‘in placing the great at the centre of our national myth’: If Lloyd George and Winston Churchill epitomise national resistance to Germany in two world wars, Joan of Arc and General de Gaulle are central to the French national self-image and F.D. Roosevelt is central to the story of America’s interwar economic recovery, and Nelson Mandela ...”

“... United Nations’ role in the present crisis – a clear case of academics being as quick off the mark as journalists. Iraq’s claim depends on the proposition that Iraq is Turkey’s legal heir, and on the evidence, which exists but which is meagre, that in the 19th century the al-Sabah sheikhs of Kuwait acknowledged the suzerainty of the distant ...”

“... someone who had read it all before a dozen times? This train of speculation leads us closer to the mark. The official biography, and Churchill’s own works, are far too extensive for most people to read even if they could afford to buy them, which they cannot. So there is a huge and lucrative gap in the market for the middle-range biography. The point happens ...”

“... writes in his new book, ‘the distinction between sanity and madness always has a question-mark over it.’ Phillips doesn’t want to get rid of the question-mark, but he thinks it helps give sanity a bad reputation, and like Pound invites us to think about what ‘sane enough’ means. He cites an American court ...”

“... True or false? 1. Winston Churchill sent in troops against striking miners at Tonypandy. 2. Stanley Baldwin confessed with ‘appalling frankness’ that he did not rearm because he would have lost the 1935 General Election. 3. Ernest Bevin said of the Labour Party’s relations with the Soviet Union: ‘Left can speak to Left ...”

“... was a convert to imperialism. That ‘Radical Joe’ would transform himself, in the words of Winston Churchill, from Fiery Red to True Blue was a change beyond the wit of political pundits to predict. But then, no one could possibly have predicted the explosive impact of the Irish question on political alignments. In 1886, Gladstone declared in favour of ...”

“... more. They drove away in a blue Escort van that was later found eight miles away in the hills that mark the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic. Darren Graham is the premature baby Cecil Graham was visiting when the IRA killed him. He is the embodiment of all the reasons why the idea of ‘two traditions’ – Catholic nationalist and Protestant ...”

“... perhaps, is the omission of any reference to the most important Ralegh discovery in recent years, Mark Nicholls’s publication in 1995 of the prosecution summary of the evidence in the Main Plot trial of 1603. This is not the first edition of Ralegh’s letters. Edward Edwards published 159 letters in his Life of Ralegh in 1868, but chiefly from the main ...”

“... to ‘W. Shakespeare’ or ‘M. Drayton’. At around the same time, what we call a ‘quotation mark’ (”), the descendant of the diplē (>), which had been used to mark notable passages in manuscripts, began to be used to mark sententiae, or memorable phrases, in vernacular ...”

“... answer to that. In a speech in London just a week after the crash – delivered, ironically, to mark the first anniversary of the City’s ‘Big Bang’ – the Chancellor admitted that markets were far from perfect. He was not impressed by the herd instinct, he added. But he likened his attitude to the market to ...”

“... their way to look masculine, well, that is the way it was. Why, incidentally, is there a question-mark after ‘victory’ in the title? Women war-workers turn up again in Caroline Dakers’s The Countryside at War, tilling the land in company with soldiers, German prisoners and conscientious objectors, a more-than-dubious mix in the farmer’s eyes. The ...”

“... So a happy life too? He himself, it seems, was not quite so sure. At his memorial service, Mark Bonham Carter revealed that Grimond thought of his career as a failure. True, after he became leader of the Liberal Party in 1956, in the midst of the Suez crisis, with only five followers in the House of Commons, he may have promised it a resurgent role in ...”