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“... is peculiarly American, but it is probably no accident that it has flourished so prodigally there. Frank Kermode once wrote that reading a certain poem by Wallace Stevens made the hair on the back of his neck stand on end, a statement it would be as hard to imagine issuing from the lips of a young American professor in pursuit of tenure as it would be ...”

“... remember us watching at home was England v. Argentina in the 1998 World Cup – the match in which Michael Owen scored that goal and David Beckham was shown that effigy-birthing red card. It was at McDonald’s that I was introduced to tactical discourse and talk of transfer windows; to the idea that a player being sold by a club for millions of pounds could ...”

“... Method. The translation appeared under Ogden’s name, though it was mainly undertaken by Frank Ramsey, then still just a precocious mathematics undergraduate. It also included some modifications by Wittgenstein himself. A revised edition, with further modifications by him, appeared in 1933.Wittgenstein’s changes were prompted by what struck him as ...”

“... elected in 1982, long before that distant nirvana of ‘fifteen, ten years ago’ described by Michael Fallon, when trying to touch up young female researchers, lobby correspondents or political activists was ‘acceptable’, just harmless ‘flirtation’. Some male MPs believe they still live in that era; while one insisted that it ‘absolutely does ...”

“... like his name sounded, describing the head of the British National Oil Corporation (BNOC), Sir Frank Kearton, as ‘an inside guy at the skunk works’. Unfortunately, Harvie is an intellectual magpie and his book is irritatingly, or rather maddeningly, written, a series of digressions about every subject under the sun. He cannot bear, for example, to ...”

“... repeatedly refers to ‘Lord Victor Rothschild’ in a book published by the ancient firm of Lord Frank Longford) and, finally, given the belief of Anthony Cave Brown that treason is a heritable trait, the Bell Curve theory of clubland skulduggery.Yet this is the standard, both of writing and editing and research. When James Jesus Angleton, crazed and ...”

“... born in Market Square, slap bang in the middle of Lichfield, in September 1709, the elder son of Michael Johnson and his wife, Sarah, rather old and very proud parents. They had, Johnson recalled, ‘not much happiness from each other’, and immediately deposited their ambitions in him. Michael, the son of a labourer, had ...”

“... Marilyn Monroe fucked both Kennedy brothers before taking her own life, if she did indeed take it. Frank Sinatra raised money for the Reagans and acted as at least a confidante to the First Lady. Norman Podhoretz’s son-in-law Elliott Abrams, while working as Reagan’s Assistant Secretary of State, dunned the Sultan of Brunei for a $10 million backhander to ...”

“... grow up sound, just as Milne himself did, according to the not unmalicious eulogy propounded by Frank Swinnerton. Milne is so far out of the literary fashion that he failed to detest his parents. His parents had previously failed to ill-treat and misunderstand him. He failed to detest his school and his schoolfellows. He married early, and his marriage ...”

“... optimism -‘cheerfulness in the bunker’ – before polling day in the 1874 General Election. ‘Michael Foot might have said it during the 1983 campaign’ is a cheeky aside, given that Jenkins evidently expects his readers to remember who was in which bunker at the relevant moment. There is more to Gladstone, however, than politics. His restless energy ...”

“... not like myself ... I deprecated the impacted layers of repression that prevented me from being frank and free and emotional.’ The result was a seeming, in the end perhaps a habitual callousness. It is revealing to read, in his most considerable historical book, The Survival of Scotland (1968), a sentence starting, ‘In the temper of today, when social ...”

“... pleasure. But he hasn’t yielded, as some of his colleagues yielded. There is a sense in which Frank O’Connor stayed, imaginatively, in the small towns of his boyhood, and let the new Ireland mind its own grubby business. Liam O’Flaherty, too, wrote as if his first experiences were definitive and could only be lost if pestered by later matters. ...”

“... isn’t clear that British politicians appreciated these nuances, though some officials, including Michael Oatley, the MI6 man on the ground, certainly did. The principal IRA objective was an invitingly lowish hurdle, and should have been seen as such: ‘an acknowledgment of the right of the Irish people to determine their own future without interference from ...”

“... personal life (as an adult, anyway) or the relationship between work and family. Inglis is frank about this. ‘Recreating the necessarily private magnificence of the Hoggarts’ family life is impossible to me,’ he writes. ‘I don’t know enough and I haven’t the talent. But its actuality cannot be doubted.’ There is a contrast here with ...”

“... will be interesting to see if Hollywood makes Craig look as sallow-cheeked and paunchy as Michael Nyqvist, the lead actor in the Swedish films, or – more unlikely still – if Mara looks as pierced, forbidding and downright scary as the ordinarily very pretty Noomi Rapace does in the originals.) There are other sides to the Larsson industry too. On ...”