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“... and accumulate so many tiny shrubs that, in our opinion, the outline of the forest is lost. Our Christopher Sykes set the tone in 1975 when he described the (American) Evelyn Waugh Newsletter as ‘overloaded with pedantic debate about trifles’. I have not seen the Newsletter’s review of his official biography, but one American claimed to have counted ...”

“... do heroin it was the end for him.’ But, of course, using drugs is a symptom, not the disease. As Christopher Gibbs says, There were various chimerae that he was pursuing. And they were all to do with fulfilments of some kind. I think Robert was far too enthralled with his lower nature. I really do think he was seriously indulgent to his appetites. I ...”

“... Gothic texts, some sort of metempsychosis or rebirth. Both of these men are disturbed or mad. Nicholas Dyer is imagined as the builder of Nicholas Hawksmoor’s churches in the East End of London: the enlightened edifices of a rational Christianity are thereby ascribed to a devil-worshipper, while the name ...”

“... Luard’s book casts a sharp sidelight on the scene Thompson needs to evoke. Her husband, Nicholas, was an acquaintance of Lucan and they had an important mutual friend in the painter Dominick Elwes, whose suicide in 1975 was, one way or another, a consequence of the murder in Lower Belgrave Street. ...”

“... But broadly speaking, the radical historians of Empire – David Killingray, Peter Sluglett, Nicholas Tarling – have been confined to the final, historiographical volume, while the more conservative have been given the meaty chapters in the bulk of the History. The purpose of the Historiography volume is to trace themes that were dealt with ...”

“... champion of Blenheim (1712), an eye-catching edition of Shakespeare by the future Whig laureate Nicholas Rowe (1709) and Addison’s heavily ideological tragedy Cato (1713), for which he paid more than £100 before the play was even performed. Godfrey Kneller’s Kit Cat Club portraits, clockwise from top left: Jacob Tonson (1717); Robert Walpole ...”

“... most significant character, alluded to in the title, is an assassination historian at the CIA, Nicholas Branch, who is overwhelmed by the sheer mass of sources he spends his life judiciously sifting. For most, however, the temptation to reach a conclusion counter to the Warren version has proved irresistible. Charles McCarry’s The Tears of Autumn ...”

“... and conduct in those biographies of Cromwell which have a soft spot for God’s Englishman. Christopher Hill skips lightly over it. John Buchan refers to it as ‘a farmyard jape’ and excuses it on the grounds that ‘this thing touched the heart of his authority and he could permit no weakening.’ Others suggest that the story is probably royalist ...”

“... may be seen in an examination of two sections dealing with overtly political writings. Nicholas Canny and Andrew Carpenter introduce ‘The Early Planters: Spenser and his Contemporaries’ by reaffirming Spenser’s status as a great poet in the English tradition, and then by redescribing him as an ‘apologist’ for English rule in ...”

“... anyone seeking to divine the underlying logic of Johnson’s apparently chaotic administration (Christopher Clark writes about Cummings’s blog and his obsession with Bismarck on p.21). There is a guilty frisson in the idea of a lawless nihilist pulling all the strings, but to grasp the danger Cummings poses, one has to start by recognising how ordinary ...”

“... to the extension of financial scrutiny) and for perpetual backbenchers (notably and successfully, Christopher Price, who chaired the Education Committee up to 1983). Cynics – that is, party whips – may regard the committees as a cheap way of keeping potential dissenters quiet (not always successfully, as anyone who knows Tory MPs ...”

“... But politicians weren’t blameless. ‘All prime ministers love intelligence,’ the diplomat Nicholas Henderson claimed: it allows them to believe that they have a ‘direct line to something that no other ordinary departments have’. At the beginning it all looked innocent enough. GCHQ grew out of the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley ...”

“... in The Fatty Arbuckle Story) or professional golfers (Hugh Grant in The Phil Mickelson Story, Christopher Walken in The Chi Chi Rodriguez Story). He and a partner ominously rent an office more than a hundred floors up in the World Trade Center. ‘Seems kind of flimsy up here,’ Otis says. ‘Nah,’ the partner says, ‘built like a battleship.’ Horst ...”

“... best legitimate heir. Both the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, and the Bishop of London, Nicholas Ridley, openly and precisely said that both Mary and Elizabeth were bastards. Mary’s remarkable initial success came from single-mindedly stressing the one asset she possessed: bastard or no bastard, she was flesh of Henry VIII’s flesh. What she did ...”

“... was occasionally upset by a new court favourite or power broker (Robert Dudley, say, or Christopher Hatton), or sometimes a policy (on military intervention abroad, perhaps, or, most divisive of all, on marriage alliances for the queen), much of the time the court functioned well. The challenge was to keep things going: to make policy and navigate ...”