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“... to everyone who called on him, from the radical Huey Long of Louisiana to the conservative Joe Robinson of Arkansas. ‘Orson, you and I are the two greatest actors in America,’ he told Orson Welles. FDR’s acting talents were very soon challenged by events. The sense of paralysis that gripped the Hoover administration during its last days had spread to ...”

“... loved of Ezra Pound has been said, and continues to be said, of the poets and poetries loved of Charles Bernstein and Ron Silliman – two of the most important and influential of these new American writers. The anthologies edited by Silliman and Douglas Messerli contain a great deal of unpleasant and difficult poetry – for example, this passage from ...”

“... she calls ‘a social, personal and cultural history from the fall of Parnell to the realm of Mary Robinson’, does not list Micheál Mac Gréil’s books in the bibliography. Her book does not deal much with Catholicism as a system nor as a powerful monolith. It does not dwell very much on how the bishops sought to control institutions such as schools and ...”

“... recalled to Moscow, had a marked tendency to check out. (One such ‘disappeared’ member, Donald Robinson, falsely accused of contact with Trotsky in Mexico, later turned up in Hiss’s handwritten notes of the period and is the reason some on the left have always doubted Hiss’s word.) Chambers contrived to separate himself from the clandestine Communist ...”

“... Noting Jack Lindsay’s statement that Bunyan’s The Holy War, published in 1682 near the end of Charles II’s reign, is a commentary on ‘absolutism against the liberties of the people’, Greaves asserts that this view ‘cannot be sustained’, but doesn’t explain why. Yet Sharon Achinstein, a scholar he cites elsewhere, has convincingly argued that ...”

“... it was: not only solitary reproduction but self-regeneration. Among the highest forms of life – Charles I, say, or Louis XVI – to cut in two is to kill; but to divide the LCS in two is to stimulate a process of infinite growth, ‘unbounded extension’, apparent immortality. Alongside this representation of the Society as unbounded, however, there is ...”

“... In 1629, King Charles I granted the Massachusetts Bay Company a standard commercial charter containing a clerical slip that changed the world. The document charged the stockholders with duly electing a board of management – a governor and 18 assistants – and holding them to account at quarterly meetings. However, crown officials failed to specify where the company headquarters should be (London would have been the usual assumption) and the wily leaders of the company absconded to New England, where they transformed quarterly meetings into government sessions, stockholders into freemen, assistants into magistrates, the governor into a Governor, and then piously declared their new regime to be ‘a city on a hill’ ready to serve as a model of divinely inspired governance for the rest of the world (well, for England, which came to the same thing ...”

“... find her presiding over the counters of the smarter shops – Marshall and Snelgrove, Matthias Robinson or, in my aunties’ case, Manfield’s Shoe Shop and White’s Ladies Gowns. The Davis manner, bored, sceptical, sarcastic, was particularly effective when ‘chalking people off’, as Mam called it. It was something she never had enough ...”

“... with Spain would be possible and profitable: this culminates in the ludicrous episode where Prince Charles and Buckingham set off for Spain incognito (for about five minutes), as Jack and Tom Smith, to bring back the King of Spain’s daughter as Charles’s bride. Finally, there was his most expensive and perhaps most ...”

“... which is credited with destroying silent cinema. Already primed on the show-biz sensations of Charles Lindbergh’s trans-Atlantic flight and Babe Ruth’s 60 home runs, the 1927 audience reached a new plateau of hysteria. Although The Jazz Singer’s profit margin has been overestimated (by Rogin as well), the movie instantly established Warners as a ...”

“... reputation would have been left to the mercy of several stridently unsympathetic witnesses. Charles Kray (in Me and My Brothers) saw the Lambrianous as ‘paper villains, concerned only to take whatever glory attached to their connection with the twins’. Brain McConnell was equally tart in his 1969 investigation, The Rise and Fall of the Brothers ...”

“... premier reward for martyrdom. The relationship between sainthood and stupidity – think of Charles Bovary, a fool raised by what he endures, or Princess Diana, the patron saint of non-swots – is a connection that lies too deep for tears in these biographies. Yes, they are simple-hearted bids for approval, but there is also something vicious in the ...”

“... Samuel Parr (‘the Whig Dr Johnson’), the great liberal advocate Thomas Erskine, R.B. Sheridan, Charles James Fox, the novelists and dramatists Elizabeth Inchbald, Thomas Holcroft, Amelia Alderson, Mary Hays and Charlotte Smith, as well as Godwin’s publisher George Robinson and a number of dissenting ministers ...”

“... was addressed was in little danger of becoming meaningless. ‘I’m very glad you like Alice,’ Charles Dodgson wrote to Margery Worthington in 1895, ‘but what wicked wicked sisters you have not to let you read it till they go to school! But perhaps the mistress had told them they had to learn a page of it by heart as a lesson?’ Dodgson is toasting the ...”

“... and unknowable was also what she wrote about best. It’s said that the reclusive French composer Charles-Valentin Alkan rented a house in Paris with two front doors, so that whenever someone called at one of them, he could claim he had been in the other part of the house and hadn’t heard the bell. Haushofer divided her life after the war between Vienna and ...”