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“... McCullough’s Truman (1992) was on the bestseller lists for the better part of a year, and his John Adams (2001) is providing an astonishing repeat performance. Robert Caro’s dramatically detailed look at The Years of Lyndon Johnson has been unfolding since 1982, and large chunks of Volume Three have been serialised in the New Yorker. In the ...”

“... as he is about the costs of the Falklands, or the welfare of the Polish Government. Like Mr Foot, John Rentoul of the New Statesman has contributed some crucial articles – turning-points in the affair. David Leigh of the Observer wrote on 6 January 1985, ‘The intercepted Argentine signals were decoded and telexed at the time directly to Navy HQ at ...”

“... although it seems no live recordings survive from their heyday – that is, before Lou Reed kicked John Cale out of the band, ending three years of almost symbiotic closeness. John Cale was born in the small Welsh coal town of Garnant, between Swansea and Carmarthen, in 1942. His father was a miner; his mother had worked in ...”

“... and the movie I selected, or, as a matter of fact, my daughter Tricia selected it, was Chisum with John Wayne. It was a Western. FDR was known to admire Myrna Loy and Ike to enjoy watching shoot-’em-ups; underdog Harry Truman had been inspired by Frank Capra’s 1948 State of the Union and, as the son of a sometime Hollywood mogul, Kennedy was groomed for ...”

“... follows a remarkable passage: ‘Among the neglected men I have found Robert Bage, Henry Brooke, John Bunyan, Geoffrey Chaucer, Thomas Delaney [sic], Emanuel Ford, William Godwin, Richard Graves, Robert Greene, Robert Henryson, Charles Johnstone, Charles Lever, M.G. Lewis, Thomas Lodge, Henry MacKenzie [sic], Thomas Malory, Charles Maturin, Walter ...”

“... 1743, Anna Letitia Aikin was the product of a distinguished Unitarian background, the daughter of John Aikin, a revered teacher at the Warrington Academy. The academy was effectively the leading university for those dissenters who had enough money to get an education but who were forbidden by law to take degrees at Oxford or Cambridge. Although, like all such ...”

“... in office, President Clinton was more parsimonious in granting pardons than any president since John Adams two hundred years earlier. But he made up for this at the end when he cast aside the ordinary process for handling federal clemency applications and, in the words of the American lawyer Margaret Colgate, ‘enjoyed a final unencumbered opportunity to ...”

“... 1965, rummaging through a junk shop, Wilson found a bootlegged 78 with the label: ‘Bessie Smith – Nobody in Town Can Bake a Sweet Jelly Roll Like Mine.’ Wilson had heard rock and roll and pop songs as a child but never the blues. Smith’s sound was a revelation. ‘The universe stuttered and everything fell to ...”

“... media friendly, discounts to TV crews who look like TV crews. The Paramount is clearly the joint John Lanchester’s characters allude to in The Debt to Pleasure. ‘Bed, sheets, fittings, lamps, lightbulbs – all black ... I stayed in a flash hotel in New York that was a bit like that.’ The cab-summoners, out on the street, in long torpedo coats and wool ...”

“... years, who is spattered with ordure in The Dunciad; ‘stage-struck priests’ like the Rev. John Home, whose Douglas gave rise to a Scottish roar from the pit: ‘Whaur’s yer Wullie Shakespeare noo?’ There is word of parsonical whorings and slayings, of deep draughts in taverns and stews; there are all manner of clerical bruisers, men like the Revds ...”

“... Fund had an impressive range of supporters, including ‘All the staff at W.H. Smith, Kingsway (except the manager)’. Lord Goodman effectively blocked Goldsmith’s chances of buying the Observer in the autumn of 1976, but the Eye case had already generated considerable resistance among the journalistic staff. It was then that ...”

“... below, he chats to his fellow journalists: ‘the pug-nosed, the pug-eared Morgan’, Davidson-Smith (‘overcoated’, ‘deerstalker-hatted’) and Freddie Fredericks, Frank Attercliffe’s aging and alcoholic mentor, and co-author with him of Pindar’s Weekend Round-up, a sports column on the Northern Post. After the match, in the Buckingham ...”

“... and Eurocentric perspective’ date from the first half of the last century. Set against, say, John Elliott’s concept of a ‘multiple monarchy’ (Elliott is absent even from Kamen’s bibliography which, given his enormous influence, is difficult to account for) or Serge Gruzinski’s writings on mestisaje (also absent) which depict the Empire as not ...”

“... for the wider struggle; she writes approvingly of egalitarian marriages, such as that of John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor, but is less interested in – perhaps even a little suspicious of – women who were sexually free or who publicly challenged gender roles. She skates over the divisions in the movement, and rather than predict possible ...”

“... Wyndham Lewis’s portrait of Stephen Spender upstages a row of portraits by Lamb, Coldstream and John because of its linear clarity and bite, and a Matthew Smith holds your eye by force of juicy paint and saturated colour alone. Yet thin paint in the work of Stanley Spencer and Paul Nash is part of an Englishness (or ...”