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“... without, individually, ceasing to be delightful. Here, for example, is a part of his account of Joel Barlow, confined in the lazar-house at Marseille, and about to contemplate the origin of rivers and the meaning of pagan nature-cults: The cooks of the establishment kept a sturdy Provençal kitchen that made few concessions to the broiling August ...”

“... Adams and his son John Quincy. Conversely, 24 years after Andrew Jackson of Tennessee left the White House in 1837, the next generation of Southerners led 11 states out of the Union, founding a Southern Confederacy to preserve the institution of slavery from the meddling of Abraham Lincoln. As a result, the United States was temporarily dissolved, and the ...”

“... too. Lang approached two wealthy young entrepreneurs to fund the studio project, and one of them, Joel Rosenman, suggested it might make more sense to put money into a live event. Woodstock Ventures was duly constituted and the team set to work on a ‘music and arts fair’. But who would lease the land for a gathering of fifty or sixty thousand people? Lang ...”

“... in her. Things changed in the 20th century. Indeed, the modern age has overturned the assertion of White Kennet, an early 18th-century bishop of Peterborough, that ‘Qu. Elizabeth had a Camden, and King Charles a Clarendon, but poor James I has had I think none but paltry scribblers.’ The rise of the historical novel and the popular biography has produced a ...”

“... to satire has become more confused. He still likes to give his characters sub-Pynchon names – Joel Sublett, Kevin Tarkovsky, Lucius Warbaby – and to extrapolate future backdrops from contemporary anxieties: Aids, pollution and biological weapons are particular favourites, along with the menace of unregulated nanotechnology, which Gibson was on to long ...”

“... plagiarist (his speeches stole from Neil Kinnock and JFK). Age took the edge off him. Reaching the White House four years ago, he accomplished at 78 what he couldn’t manage at 45 or 65. Perhaps he’s been better at the job as a mellow old man than he would have been as a middle-aged hothead – though that is little comfort to the rest of the ...”

“... are antique shops in Stockbridge, where antique seems to mean the day before yesterday. And grand white wooden houses, behind evergreen trees, houses which turn out to be lunatic asylums. Stockbridge, peaceful home of Norman Rockwell, the people’s artist, who gave Middle America what it wanted. Stockbridge, where Melville said something unmemorable to ...”

“... which he describes as ‘broad, like her face’, and, a moment later, as ‘a sea urchin on the white ocean floor’. Van Horne’s moony and Verna’s flash would interest Alberto Moravia, whose latest novel, The Voyeur, is much concerned with sexual exhibitionism and the relations – necessary and interchangeable – between exhibitionist and ...”

“... Now, just as an indication of how the party’s changing, Wilfred got selected for Chippenham – white, middle-class, you know, deepest Wiltshire. And Wilfred tooled up to the selection meeting, wearing his jeans and an open-necked shirt, and just took them by storm. And they love him.’ ‘Do you want to meet Wilfred?’ the press officer ...”

“... of young writers determined to make their mark. Dazzling no one but well-liked, he wore dashing white boots, ran through the money his mother left him and embarked on a scandalous affair with a married woman. In 1647, judging it was time he settled down, his father found him a wife, Marie Héricart. She was 14 and brought him a useful dowry. Marie has ...”

“... and confinement by teaching himself chess from a book of famous games, playing both Black and White; he exhausts the games in the book and plays himself in his head, his Black self improving to solve the ever harder problems his White self sets; eventually, divided, he goes mad. Reassuringly, this isn’t how chess is ...”

“... the great Purity Demonstration in Hyde Park, attended by van-loads of young girls dressed in white, which promoted the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885. Afterwards, in 1887, he persuaded the police to use their powers under this Act to close brothels in Tower Hamlets. In the words of Charrington’s admiring biographer, ‘our ...”

“... power to intervene in any company at all. In August 1974, the new Labour Government issued a White Paper on the regeneration of industry which reneged on all three projects. In 1982, the party published another programme. This, as Whiteley says, more closely resembles his own, but is weaker and more equivocal. Although it proposes a new Department of ...”

“... She scribbled notes to her defence counsel, whom she addressed from the witness-stand as ‘Joel’, she bristled at certain infelicities of procedure, but at no point did she reveal herself to be a woman with a broken heart. To Diana Trilling she exhibited the belle indifférence of the morbid hysteric, but it may be that during the trial Mrs Harris ...”

“... like fish and rutted like goats. Once, at the New Yorker, Joseph Mitchell came across Katharine White and Sayre’s mother, Gertrude Lynahan Sayre, snickering over a passage from Edmund Wilson’s Memoirs of Hecate County (1946) in which the narrator referred to his penis as a ‘club’. ‘His club!’ one of them exclaimed. ‘Bunny’s club,’ said the ...”