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“... want to wear socks with sandals. About two hundred yards from the gate entry is procured from a guy charging £20 to stamp you with the entry pass. Another half-mile hike to the Stone Circle, where I’d arranged to meet people; ‘let’s meet at the Stone Circle’ has a better ring to it than ‘see you down the pub.’People met, bags dumped in the ...”

“... summoned. His lofty earlier debates on the Agony in the Garden and Cain and Abel with his friend John Colet would have remained unknown – Colet was not one to rush into print – if Erasmus had not written them up and got them into circulation. If Colet’s new St Paul’s School was known abroad, it was Erasmus’s doing. Even Jean Vitrier, coming to ...”

“... was more to all this than shared churchmanship. In a celebrated comparison between Andrewes and John Donne, Eliot maintained that Andrewes was a ‘medieval’ rather than a ‘modern’ writer. He valued Andrewes because his magnificently dense prose subordinated personality to the demands of text, community and tradition. Andrewes bypassed subjective ...”

“... in Action. Entirely absent, or mentioned only in passing, are Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, John Yoo, Elliott Abrams, Ahmed Chalabi, Ayad Allawi, Rick Santorum, Trent Lott, Tom DeLay, Richard Armitage, Katherine Harris, Ken Mehlman, Paul O’Neill, Rush Limbaugh. Barely appearing at all are John Ashcroft, Samuel ...”

“... maybe more than just as an editor. His narrative is entirely about being taken seriously by Elton John, Princess Diana, George Michael, Anthea Turner, Richard Branson, Paul McCartney, Patsy Kensit, Ian Botham, Jordan, Mohammed al Fayed, Cherie Blair, Alastair Campbell, Peter Mandelson and Tony Blair. (If there are names in that list you haven’t heard ...”

“... an ancient word for ‘shit’, or something equally repulsive). Scarnsea’s physician, Brother Guy of Malton, a Spanish moor worried about the position of immigrant monks in a post-monastic society, asks: ‘What has this house become?’ Shardlake replies: ‘You might as well ask what a country England has become.’ The English have reclaimed their ...”

“... field for a woman. Its policy on female employees was unusually egalitarian. When Matheson met John Reith, the first director-general, through her work for Astor, he recruited her to be director of talks on the phenomenal salary of £900 a year. She was 38 and unmarried, fully formed as a character. Yet the Matheson of this period remains, despite her ...”

“... was a Bible-banging fundamentalist. When officials in Dayton, Tennessee decided to roast John Scopes for teaching evolution in 1925, they called in the ageing Bryan to prosecute. The week-long trial became a national sensation and reached its climax when the defence attorney, Clarence Darrow, called Bryan to the stand and eviscerated his Biblical ...”

“... become the adequate symbol of forces that were swindling the people of their birthright. ‘This guy’ – another common locution – didn’t have a right to give laws to Americans. When the Clinton impeachment was going forward, Obama was a young Chicago politician with other things on his mind. He could have learned something then about how the ...”

“... fined NZ$400 and his name was printed in the local newspaper that covered the case. He was the bad guy. Ina will vote in the general election ‘no matter what they think about my job’, but without much conviction: ‘Talking about election it just drives me mad. Everybody says I’m going to do this, I’m going to do that, but when it comes to actually ...”

“... expulsion if she indulged in any ‘hateful acting out’. Her therapist, Ralph Klein (Pollock’s guy), told her it would be best if she didn’t see the child again until the girl was three.All of this was supposedly for the good of the children, and there was a certain amount of quasi-reputable psychiatric opinion at the time that lent support for the idea ...”

“... aristocracy, his contempt for all other classes, and his pleasure in reaction. But then, so John Bayley observed, they move an amendment. In order to explain these aberrations, they explain that Waugh was a disillusioned romantic. Graham Greene wrote that ‘he is a romantic in the sense of having a dream which failed him’: his first marriage, the ...”

“... they want to steal they try to break into the main house, not the servants’ quarters. But this guy broke in to rape you. The odds against this are millions to one and the odds against it happening just after you’ve been raped up in Pietersburg are billions to one. So what on earth is going on? I don’t know, she said, I only saw the torch in my face. I ...”

“... a sadistic buffoon and could never have been tolerated even by the long-suffering Labour Party. John Wheatley was the intellectual and organising genius behind the Clydesiders, but you have only to watch the surviving newsreels to see why Maxton had to be the leader of that group, and you only have to study Maxton’s confused utterances to see how he could ...”

“... She never remarried after the split with Sinatra. There were, however, countless lovers, from the guy who did the props to (perhaps) Fidel Castro. Though she had some disappointments with sex, in the main her erotic life seems to have been a dizzying round of pleasure. There’s no term for the female equivalent of ‘womanising’, but if there were, Gardner ...”