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“... litigator once told me that his strategy was to ‘shut Antonin Scalia up long enough to get Anthony Kennedy on my side’.)The composition of the Supreme Court determines the path of the country. It is therefore unsurprising that appointments to the court are politically contentious. (The Trump administration displayed a rare competence in the ruthless ...”

“... of autobiographical details transmuted into verse that appears to be effortlessly precise. ‘Mr Roberts’, the second poem in the book, is a verse portrait of the ‘great Consul’, E.H. Roberts, the Latin-loving headmaster at Toowoomba, where Porter was sent after the school in Brisbane. Porter’s early published ...”

“... step taken by women has been so bitterly contested as that of speaking in public,’ Susan B. Anthony said in 1900. ‘For nothing which they have attempted, not even to secure the suffrage, have they been so abused, condemned and antagonised.’ Or as Mary Beard put it last year, ‘We have never escaped a certain male cultural desire for women’s ...”

“... Man Booker, celebrating fifty years of the prize (in his acceptance speech he credited the role Anthony Minghella’s film adaptation may have played in that result). These novels, really, are romances, in the sense that everything that happens in them is charged with magic, nothing is merely ordinary or redundant, everything finally connects together ...”

“... to describe the appearance of Peter Lorre must deal with those eyes. What teeth are to Julia Roberts and lips to Angelina Jolie, his bulging eyes were to Peter Lorre, his unavoidable calling card and a feature quite out of proportion with the norm. He featured in Looney Tunes more than once as a caricature – just two vast eyes and a menacing ...”

“... by far the most popular whipping-boy, but with minority lobbies also fingering Richard Crossman, Anthony Howard and all the other post-Sixties editors. There is little disagreement, however, about when the glory days began. The New Statesman whose past is so ubiquitously pressed into service for rival versions of its future is the magazine whose identity was ...”

“... German plans for the invasion of England. Within a few months, Le Queux had got Field-Marshal Lord Roberts and Harmsworth to believe there were 50,000 German waiters spying in London. No, 80,000 German soldiers, said Roberts, employed mostly on the railways. No, 350,000 German soldiers, said Colonel Driscoll DSO, working as ...”

“... fractionally less lively than the identically costumed attendants, some of them startlingly like Anthony Perkins’s mother in Psycho.Then to an antique fair in the middle of some zone industrielle, every stall stocked with the appurtenances of French bourgeois life: great bullying wardrobes, huge ponderous mirrors and cabinets of flowery china. For the ...”

“... other material has come to light since then, it remains one of the best-proportioned accounts. Anthony West’s H.G. Wells: Aspects of a Life (1984) enjoyed a special authority, being written by the offspring of the relationship with Rebecca West. More recently, there have been full-length treatments of different kinds by Michael Sherborne (2010) and Adam ...”

“... provided material for such distinguished hams as Jason Robards, Rip Torn, Philip Baker Hall and Anthony Hopkins. Feeney contends that Nixon had a unique capacity among US presidents for constructing narratives around himself. He renames Nixon’s memoir, Six Crises, ‘Six Star Turns’, and notes that its subject ‘presents himself throughout as if he ...”

“... specified but was stated to be ‘in the megaton range’. The phrase originates in the statement Anthony Eden made to the House of Commons in June 1956 announcing that the Grapple series would be held the following year and that they would be thermonuclear tests ‘in the megaton range’. Furthermore Eden assured the House that ‘the tests will be high air ...”

“... of French pop performers: Sylvie Vartan (‘a tarty-looking piece’), Johnnie Halliday, Richard Anthony. Alien noises ‘coming out of my daughter’s battery-operated Dansette record-player’. These temporal prompts, supposed to shift us back into period, are obtrusive. The quality of the writing makes its own time, all times, the present of the past. The ...”

“... of Lord Montagu of Beaulieu for homosexuality, the counsel for the prosecution, G.D. ‘Khaki’ Roberts (‘fruity-voiced, with a bottle of bright pink cough mixture always at hand’), put it to Peter Wildeblood, one of the co-defendants, that his lover Edward McNally was ‘infinitely his social inferior’, as though this social miscegenation were as ...”

“... to humanise it. His great find is a previously unseen cache of letters from the young Margaret Roberts to her older sister, Muriel, written variously from Grantham, Oxford and Dartford. There, she talks about boyfriends, fashion, shopping and the various inconveniences of life in wartime and then austerity Britain. They are, I suppose, human. But boy are ...”

“... airy and vulgar as gravure advertisements for kitchenware. It is worth emphasising how far Penn, Anthony Mann, Fuller, Nicholas Ray and Peckinpah have disproved those rosy, statuesque images. Could Ford match the harrowing historical perspective of Little Big Man, the moral ambiguity of The Far Country, the painful violence of Run of the Arrow, the passion ...”