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“... Hall dictated more than a million words, he tells us, as source material for future historians. To John Goodwin, his trusty press officer, he has allotted the task of anthologising some quarter-million of those words. Goodwin has been his word processor. This book is an example of information technology. The dictator ...”

“... shifts take place. He does refer to one theological factor of some historical importance. John Cotton, who left England for New England in 1633, was an experimental predestinarian on this side of the Atlantic who slipped into something very like antinomianism in America. He did so by reviving Calvin. Assurance is the essence of saving faith, and faith ...”

“... It belongs, in fact, in the category of Jack&Ian’s despised astrobiology. Unlike Jack&Ian, Simon Goodwin and John Gribbin are very keen on habitable zones, drawing two concentric spheres of habitability out from the Sun to mark the limits between which it might be worth looking for life. After reading Evolving the Alien ...”

“... in history are all the rage – nowhere more so than in the study of the English Civil Wars. John Morrill, that panjandrum of Civil War revisionism, is reported to have advised a recent meeting of the Royal Historical Society to think of 1640-60 not as the first of Europe’s modern revolutions but as the last of its wars of religion. J.T. Cliffe’s ...”

“... 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 the current obsession with the private lives of public figures. But the books about the President’s women are written in the opposite spirit from the one about ...”

“... but while he was researching the Barbican exhibition Mellor got in touch with her daughter, Boty Goodwin, who was then in her twenties. She took him to the family home in Kent and he saw a cache of her mother’s paintings, which transformed his ideas: ‘Suddenly the whole history of British Pop Art was different.’Well, yes and no. As Marc Kristal ...”

“... lack biographies in depth of key religious figure such as Stephen Marshall, Cornelius Burges, John Goodwin, Edmund Calamy, Henry Burton and others. They flit tantalisingly through the pages of Valerie Pearl’s valuable study of the London revolution of 1641, or Anthony Fletcher’s equally important analysis of petitioning on the eve of Civil ...”

“... improved on, with the publication of such instant classics as How to Become a Schizophrenic by John Modrow (1992) and How to Shit in the Woods by Kathleen Meyer (1989).1 There are people who will only read Westerns or Crime and others who prefer not to read any book unless, like the works of Maya Angelou, it manages somehow to have a self-help ...”

“... of the condition by American novelists are surprisingly rare. One of the most vivid comes from John Updike’s Bech is back, the second of his books to deal with the American writer’s life through the alter ego of unprolific Jewish novelist Henry Bech, here attending a party: Like a fuzzy sock being ejected by the tumble drier there was flung towards ...”

“... Goodwin Wharton is a fascinating and amusing figure, but he is sui generis: the same things which make his flirtations with the occult such amusing reading also make it difficult to compare his doings with those of anyone else. He is a figure of the same chronological vintage as Sir Isaac Newton, dabbling in alchemy and gravity by turns, and he exhibits a perhaps comparable mixture (though in very different proportions) of the open-minded and the credulous ...”

“... died at the age of 67 on 3 August 1924, the day following the 18th birthday of his younger son, John Conrad, the author of the present book. John’s memories, which reach astonishingly far back into his earliest childhood, begin with his family living in poverty in a tiny cottage, ‘a dark and gloomy place’, at ...”

“... officials.The rudiments of wreck law were widely known. When a ship ran aground on the deadly Goodwin Sands in Kent in the late 16th century, the crew tied their dog to the mast and abandoned ship; returning later, ‘finding the dog alive … [they] had their ship and goods again.’ Seventeenth-century lawyers were at least as ingenious as sailors in ...”

“... mixing ‘Marxism, narcissism and paganism’, a realisation of the ‘dystopian fantasy of John Lennon’. Talk of ‘white culture’ under threat lit up social media. Commentators wondered if a radical right-wing vision of politics defined by ‘faith, family and flag’ was taking root in the UK. By then, I was long gone. The press officer came ...”

“... sound more like parody than playfulness; while, for all its entertainment value, the politician Goodwin Wharton’s conviction that God intended him to lie with James II’s wife and remedy her childlessness, whereupon the grateful monarch would abdicate in his favour, can only be attributed to plain lunacy. Robert Darnton reports on the autobiography of an ...”

“... status of logician or psychologist. This is Nero Wolfe lecturing his secretary-bodyguard Archie Goodwin, in Rex Stout’s Fer-de-Lance (1934), the first of the series: Must I again remind you, Archie, of the reaction you would have got if you had asked Velázquez to explain why Aesop’s hand was resting inside his robe instead of hanging by his side? Must ...”