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“... at any rate appear to be, so many more of them than there were. Some may attribute the change to Margaret Thatcher, with her outspoken determination to roll back the encroaching state, her vehement belief in free, competitive markets, her implacable hostility to the trade unions, and her famous remark that ‘there is no such thing as society.’ But as ...”

“... chivalry stands contempt. A pleasanter irony, also involving chivalry, arises in the story of Margaret Nicholson, a seamstress, who in 1786 approached George III with a written petition and, concealed beneath it, a knife. ‘The king was saved by his exceedingly fine manners,’ for as he took the petition he bowed deeply to the woman and avoided the ...”

“... don’t know how seriously they’ve thought about paying for it. We can be pretty sure that John Smith, and the Labour mainstream generally, takes a less hysterical view about the loss of sovereignty than even Douglas Hurd finds it prudent to disclose before a Tory audience. The Liberal Democrats, being shamelessly federal, have fewer problems, though ...”

“... for the quick sketch that captured the essence of a man in a few physical details. Logan Pearsall Smith called him ‘the Rembrandt of English prose’. In his French Revolution, his private letters, and elsewhere, he dashes off one vignette after another. Fred Kaplan quotes one of the less well-known of these cameo portraits, depicting the French historian ...”

“... relationship with the poet H. Phelps Putnam, her short-lived marriage to Ogden Ludlow Smith (who seemed to think it was longer-lived), her affairs with her Hollywood agent Leland Hayward, Howard Hughes (producer, pilot and national hero), John Ford and Spencer Tracy. Neither Ford nor Tracy would leave their wives for her, both were prone to ...”

“... from the Philological Society and the biographical dictionary from the commercial publisher George Smith. With these two projects OUP inherited a curatorial responsibility which has, over the years, become increasingly burdensome. Unlike the National Heritage Commission, OUP has the task not just of conserving important national properties – that is to ...”

“... while Cook duly backed off. The consequence was a wholly bogus election in which John Prescott and Margaret Beckett ran in a no-hope contest, theoretically against Blair, but actually against one another for the deputy leadership. This was no fluke: both Kinnock and Smith got elected as foregone conclusions in mainly bogus ...”

“... Sumner Welles, Franklin Roosevelt and the making of New Deal foreign policy). Closest Companion (Margaret Suckley’s diary and the letters she exchanged with her cousin Franklin Roosevelt, found and edited by Geoffrey Ward) and No Ordinary Time (Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the home front during World War Two) are products of ...”

“... weird genealogies are disclosed. ‘Angus Wilson, the novelist, who bore a striking resemblance to Margaret Rutherford, the actress who originally played Miss Marple’, is present. Also namechecked are Patricia Hodge, Simon Russell Beale, Giles Gordon (once Moorcock’s literary agent), Andrea Dworkin and Iris Murdoch, who ‘sat smiling into the ...”

“... in the script. The country rejects the worn-out panaceas of the Labour administration and elects Margaret Thatcher, and she, with what Cameron calls ‘huge courage and perseverance’, sets Britain on a dynamic new course towards its now tremulous destiny as financial capitalism’s leading counting house. Thatcher is the phoenix; the 1970s, the ...”

“... for instance, who in their fictions fantasised about going to earth with a Northern farmer. Margaret McMillan, settling in Bradford, that cradle of the independent Labour Party and 1890s British socialism, gives a similar testimony, when describing how she embarked on her life’s work as an apostle of children’s nurseries. What she remembered about ...”

“... it could have belonged to someone else with the same initials – the Stratford draper William Smith, for instance – but the possibility remains strong that it was Shakespeare’s. It is certainly a genuine ring of the period, and there are other pointers in its favour. The field where it was found, Mill Close, was on land that Shakespeare had owned: it ...”

“... well and was more than reciprocally rewarded three times, in You Can’t Take It with You, Mr Smith Goes to Washington and It’s a Wonderful Life. Ford called on him for a pair of late films. In Two Rode Together, Stewart and his co-star, Richard Widmark, are lost to their better qualities, lazy, loud-voiced, working from an undernourished script, with ...”

“... Just as some faces are a gift to the photographer (Artaud, Patti Smith), so certain lives are a gift to the biographer. These are, broadly, of two types: the hard and gemlike, abbreviated, compressed, intense; and the lengthy, implausible, exfoliated, whiskery, picaresque. Vehement or even violent emotion is good, overt drama, prominent contacts or associations, sudden changes of orientation, movement through different societies and settings ...”