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“... The authorities are always interested in the assassin’s bookshelf. The Israeli police were quick to release the fact that Yigal Amir had a copy of The Day of the Jackal. Before Theodore Kaczynski, the likely ‘Unabomber’, had even been charged, the press had announced that one of his noms de guerre was ‘Conrad’ (the nom de plume of Teodor Korzeniowski) and that there was a copy of The Secret Agent on his bookshelf ...”

“... a third option for white power activists, originating with Louis Beam and William Pierce, a.k.a. Andrew Macdonald, the movement’s bard. Together they concocted the most influential and enduring of the white power projects. In Essays of a Klansman, published in 1983, Beam advocated an all-out race war. The civil rights battles, he argued, had already ...”

“... his deceit. ‘I don’t know how I can demonstrate my remorse,’ Glass is reported to have said to Andrew Sullivan, the editor who hired him. Sullivan pointed out, not in so many words, that taking a giant book advance and allowing a film to be made from the story of your misdemeanours might not be the subtlest demonstration of remorse. Next came Jayson ...”

“... to shock and amuse. It is a practice which makes him compulsive reading in a way that the thoughts of Andrew Neil never could be. And in defence of Mr Worsthorne, it is worth adding that he quite often writes something so original that it jolts lesser minds into looking at a problem anew. But none of this should be allowed to blind us to the fact that the idea ...”

“... of its conclusions – if not of its prose style. In a review of the Warren Report for Esquire, Macdonald described it as ‘an anti-Iliad that retells great and terrible events in limping prose instead of winged poetry’, but he wholeheartedly endorsed the commission’s findings. As far as I.F. Stone was concerned, the commission had ‘done a ...”

“... novel? Here’s a beginning, with apologies to Sarah Waters and Michel Faber (and a nod to George MacDonald Fraser): London, 1860. November. A pea-souper billowing up from the flotsam bobbing in the Thames. The gas lamps already blearing. Good things of day begin to drowse. The rookeries are emptying, and their birds of prey making wing to the West ...”

“... As Alan Crawford concluded in his sane and succinct 1995 study: ‘Mackintosh and Margaret Macdonald came together not only as man and woman, but also as artists. From this point on, the story of Mackintosh’s life, and of his work, cannot be told as if he were a single person.’ A more balanced interpretation of Mackintosh came with the publication ...”

“... minutes past noon on Wednesday 4 May 1921, a black waggon pulled out of the police headquarters at St Andrew’s Square. Inside, there were two prisoners, who were held in separate cabins. One of them called himself Frank Somers, though his real name was Frank J. Carty. He’d appeared in front of Stipendiary Neilson at the Central Police Court that ...”

“... to continue their journey on the existing rail network (they wouldn’t fit through the tunnels). Andrew Adonis​ , in making his case for the scheme, emphasised the economic and environmental benefits, the speeding up of services and the need for extra capacity to reduce overcrowding. Much of this reasoning has since unravelled. First to go was the ...”

“... past. And so, for a time, it proved. But, as we have now discovered, only for a time. For Ramsay MacDonald and Philip Snowden in 1931, read Callaghan, Carter and Mitterrand in our own day. National economic sovereignty is once again an illusion. The huge, unprecedented growth in world trade which was one of the main engines of the long boom of the 1950s and ...”

“... the writer working and sleeping in the house alone. We spoke on the phone sometimes about Dwight MacDonald and essayists he knew and loved. And one time we had a conversation by satellite at the Edinburgh Book Festival. Norman had a way of delighting audiences and he worked them, playing the old roué, then next minute the fierce political ...”

“... Where do we go from here? It’s pretty clear that Gordon Brown doesn’t know and that Alistair Darling and the other members of the cabinet don’t either. Nor, it seems, does anyone else. It was much easier to predict that something nasty was going to happen than it is to know now when and how the nastiness will end. You had only to cast an eye over four financial indexes – current account, corporate debt, personal debt, house prices – to know that something bad was around the corner ...”

“... substantiated in the two volumes: indeed, in the essays which have anything to say about pay policy – Andrew Thorpe on the Labour Party and the unions, Andrew Taylor on the Tories and the unions and Robert Taylor on Woodcock – it is contradicted. Andrew Taylor writes that Edward Heath made a sustained effort to convince the unions to become partners in a ...”

“... essay on madness is one such occasion, for in the midst of a long and rightly laudatory essay on MacDonald’s Mystical Bedlam and D.P. Walker’s Unclean Spirits, he seizes the opportunity to assault the late Michel Foucault and all his works. As I suggested earlier, Foucault’s historical scholarship is highly vulnerable to criticism, but those who ...”

“... Women’s Freedom League; the Cat and Mouse and Dickinson Bills date from 1913, not 1912; Ramsay MacDonald and Kathleen Courtney and Willoughby Dickinson are mis-spelt; Andrew Rosen gets the wrong Christian name on page 29; and the misleading term ‘radical suffragist’ is used to denote Lancashire working-class non-militants – a term not used at the ...”