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“... Unionism together, but he had no illusions about the task confronting him. ‘It is one thing for Mr Macmillan to talk of a wind of change blowing on another continent,’ he said, ‘but a very different matter when you have to initiate the change yourself and try to drag behind you a reactionary and reluctant party which has been in power since ...”

“... has recently been revived by Alford’s former supervisor, John Guy, in his biography of Mary, My Heart is my Own (2004). Any subsequent biographer is forced to address Guy’s case against Cecil. Alford has not done so explicitly, but he has accepted some of Guy’s charges, while others are either ignored or treated ...”

“... the presidency, there were several attempts to restore the family to the office. JFK’s brother Robert was assassinated after his victory in the California Democratic primary in 1968. The immediate chances of a third brother, Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, were scuppered after the Chappaquiddick incident in 1969 – when a young female aide ...”

“... a position he assumed, as he recently admitted, in February 1972. He was born the same year as my mother, and my parents used to live in Londonderry. If instead of meeting my dad at a dance in Dublin, she had met a young butcher called Martin from the Bogside, maybe I would be Martin ...”

“... of bigotry and fanaticism. May it never happen. Now some less dramatic thoughts about Mr Rushdie’s predicament. His situation is not unique. It is, sadly, shared by many others. His life has been threatened, he has been ‘sentenced to death’ – although the word ‘sentence’ has too judicial a flavour for the Ayatollah’s court – but ...”

“... Lord of the Admiralty before the Battle of Jutland he did consent to be called at nine. As a young MP, it was only when his third session in the House loomed that he showed up, spurred on by his Aunt Georgie Salisbury’s chiding that it was time to show some ‘overt signs of parliamentary activity’. He claimed never to read the newspapers, made no effort ...”

“... frequently set at the beginning of a line of literary history that leads to Rousseau and Henry Adams, is a narrative of the writer’s life only in a highly intermittent and drastically selective way. Its aim, as has often been noted, is more spiritual exhortation then self-revelation, or, more precisely, it is an exposition of the divine scheme with ...”

“... can’t speak like gangsters in movies? The two American films made from the story, directed by Robert Siodmak and Don Siegel, in 1946 and 1964 respectively (now re-released together on DVD by the Criterion Collection), very wisely go one better than Hemingway in this matter. They leave the movie joke out. They are up to all kinds of things, but dizzying ...”

“... Truman (1992) was on the bestseller lists for the better part of a year, and his John Adams (2001) is providing an astonishing repeat performance. Robert Caro’s dramatically detailed look at The Years of Lyndon Johnson has been unfolding since 1982, and large chunks of Volume Three have been serialised in the ...”

“... teaching poetry workshops at St Mark’s Church, collaborating with Alice Notley, Ted Berrigan, Robert Creeley and others. John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara were their guiding lights. A new American poetics was taking shape: daily and referential, tough and casual. Between 1967 and 1969 Mayer edited, with Vito Acconci, the experimental mimeographed magazine 0 ...”

“... generosity of vision which deserves the respect even of those whose loyalties are opposed to his. My concern here is not with this theme, but with the role of ‘narrative’ within it. The word is used most often, perhaps, in the phrase ‘Palestinian narrative’, variously meaning or implying ‘history’, ‘story’, ‘predicament’, ‘side of the ...”

“... against evils, and perhaps there is no easier business,’ Trollope said of the anti-slavery MP John Bright, a theatrical orator who couldn’t be bothered with political detail. Celebrating the Civil War as a triumph of freedom over slavery is equally easy. A few decades ago, US historians tried to complicate this heroic narrative. Guided at times by ...”

“... My dear Lady Olliffe,’ Robert Browning wrote in March 1877: I have just been reading my old friend Miss Martineau’s protest against the publication – and indeed, retention – of all correspondence. Here, now, is a sample of mine: be assured I shall never demand it again, from any apprehension that hereafter the friendliness in it may be at variance with whatever feeling I please to entertain thirty years hence ...”

“... a genre centred on ‘a definition of mankind’, does that not look – remembering Star Wars and Mr Spock – by some way too ambitious? Is Aldiss not, as he was in this book’s 1973 precursor, Billion Year Spree, a trifle over-persuaded by Mary Shelley? There is of course much to be said for seeing Frankenstein as simultaneously a Gothic novel and a work ...”

“... would happen to them if they did not go to war. Where, though, did responsibility lie? Partly, Robert Evans explains, with Austro-Hungary – but only partly, because the war its leaders wanted under Serbian provocation was only a small localised conflict, a third Balkan war. The main responsibility lay with the German leaders, who alone wanted a major war ...”