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“... owed a debt in turn to Marco Polo. Less famous, but no less fascinating, is the Franciscan William of Rubruck’s Itinerarium, written about forty years before Polo’s work. A reluctant messenger for Louis IX, later St Louis, William carried a letter from the French monarch to Kublai’s predecessor, Möngke ...”

“... in taverns and stews; there are all manner of clerical bruisers, men like the Revds Henry Bate and William Jackson, successive editors of the Morning Post, who gave themselves up to sparrings and scandals, and whose journalistic darts were dipped in poison. They were reckless and factional men in a reckless and factional age: E.S. Turner has something of ...”

“... gentiles’ could also be spun into a reason why the faithful should attend to them. As William Baldwin put it in the upbeat English version of Diogenes which he published in 1547 under the title A Treatise of Morall Philosophye, contayning the Sayinges of the wyse, philosophy was to be studied not for its own sake, but ‘only for this ...”

“... no doubt merely reminded his mentor of the limited facilities for shaving in submarines: but James Joyce’s young man resents his friend’s analysis and calls him a sulphur-yellow liar. We do resent, it seems, having our erotic or quasi-erotic motives explained to us; perhaps not so much because we all feel the explanation to be false, though that ...”

“... Antiquaries and historians have wrestled with Elizabeth from the outset: first there was William Camden’s ponderous official history, then the influential courtier biographies by Robert Naunton, Froude’s probing critique, the rigorous constitutionalism of A.F. Pollard, and so on to John Neale, his pupils and colleagues, and beyond to Peter Lake ...”

“... and has, rather mysteriously, been the only standard version until now, as the American translator William Weaver arrives with an excellent new rendering. Weaver’s is not merely a modern repointing of De Zoete, but a fresh imagining, which differs in important respects from its predecessor, and in almost every one improvedly (though I prefer De Zoete’s ...”

“... in Dublin, where Castlereagh was born, contained the classics of the commonwealth canon, including James Harrington’s Commonwealth of Oceana and the Memoirs of the regicide Edmund Ludlow. It wasn’t that Whig Presbyterians were against monarchy; rather, they argued that popular consent was the only acceptable basis for kingly government. The Presbyterianism ...”

“... says he loves). In Some Like It Hot, the talent booker, Mr Poliakoff, is on the phone to the William Morris Agency. Standing in his office are Jerry and Joe – Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis – a bass and a saxophone player. Jerry tries to persuade Poliakoff to give them the job – three weeks in Florida with Sweet Sue and her Society Syncopators – but ...”

“... Gallery, painted around 1620 when he was just out of his teens, with the Metropolitan Museum’s James Stuart, Fourth Duke of Lennox, painted in 1633. The former is a small picture: you look at it close. Threads of white paint highlight the old man’s hair, beard, watering eye and damp lip. Paint and flesh exchange substance. The same is true of a picture ...”

“... No one goes gentle into that good night, and the night isn’t that good. All four films – William Wellman’s in 1937 with Janet Gaynor and Fredric March, George Cukor’s in 1954 with Judy Garland and James Mason, Frank Pierson’s in 1976 with Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson, and Cooper’s now with ...”

“... oppression. In this account – inherited from early colonial philologists and historians such as William Jones and James Mill – the subcontinent had belonged since prehistoric times to one continuous, indigenous Vedic civilisation, shattered in 1192 by the first Islamic invasions.To its sympathisers, the new government ...”

“... James Hepburn opens his history of literary agency – The Author’s Empty Purse, published in l968 – with the same quotation that Graham Watson uses to conclude his reminiscences of a lifetime spent in the profession: This is the age of the middleman. He is generally a parasite. He always flourishes. I have been forced to give him some little attention lately in my particular business ...”

“... was an odd coincidence that so many of them had been raped at least once in their past. And when James had taken them to bed so that he could console them for the wrongs inflicted on them by life they usually got badly hurt soon afterwards. Or killed. That was a shame. But Honeychile displayed true grit in Dr No when she said (after her unfortunate ...”

“... I don’t believe this country has a better writer to offer than James Buchan. I can’t think of anyone who concedes so much of his own intelligence to his protagonists – doesn’t mock or belittle them – and gives them so much world to do battle with. I see no particular limitation to his scope or style: his stunningly curt dialogues and ravishing recitatives are equally persuasive ...”

“... That same summer George IV died, leaving the throne to his marginally more stable brother William. The death of the king brought a general election, and the Tories were replaced by the Whigs. The chief difference between the two parties was that the Whigs were more sensitive to the growing wrath of the unrepresented upper middle classes. They favoured ...”