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“... he informed the President that his Secretary of the Treasury, Regan, and his Chief of Staff, Jim Baker, were trading places. Struck at their very first meeting by the similarity in their names, Reagan had told Regan a joke about whether his own was pronounced ‘Raygun’ or ‘Reegun’. The President did not mention that the ‘pronunciation’ of his ...”

“... on his formative years in rural Surrey. Although trained in the architectural office of Ernest George and Harold Peto, the older of whom was an able vernacular revivalist and the younger a skilled landscape architect, he portrayed himself as a self-taught artist who learned what he needed by haunting the yards of traditional craftsmen ...”

“... big Soviet troop reductions in East-Central Europe. Early in 1989, the new American president, George H.W. Bush, still assumed that Gorbachev was ‘too good to be true’. General Scowcroft, his national security adviser, suggested he was ‘potentially more dangerous than his predecessors’. Dick Cheney, then the secretary of defense, was half-right for ...”

“... life took the shape of playwright. ‘I want to be an artist or nothing,’ he wrote in 1914 to George Pierce Baker, applying to Baker’s famous Harvard playwriting course (tuition was paid for by the Bank of Dad). James O’Neill (c. 1880). The grandiosity of O’Neill’s plan ...”

“... he been hired by the Democratic campaign President Saddam could scarcely have done more to tarnish George Bush’s reputation for foreign policy know-how. Almost every day, it seems, new evidence emerges of Iraq’s continued defiance of Gulf War ceasefire resolutions, whether it is the hampering of humanitarian efforts in the Kurdish north, the hiding of ...”

“... his administration, had achieved its ambition and would now cease publication. But a week later George III opened the new Parliament with a speech from the throne which, by its support for the peace terms being negotiated with France, reignited the wrath of the North Briton’s flamboyant co-editor John Wilkes and his backers in the City, prompting the ...”

“... by the following morning the building was a blackened shell.’Afterwards a telegram arrived from George Bernard Shaw: ‘You must be delighted. Congratulations. It will be a tremendous advantage to have a proper modern building. There are a number of other theatres I should like to see burned down.’ Shaw had opened the final season in the old ...”

“... writer has not only read her Bible, but is aware of many poets ancient and modern, most notably George Barker. One can’t talk sensibly about Smart’s prose without saying something about George Barker’s early poetry. ‘His prescription is – Excess: he will rage himself out,’ said Barker’s early friend and ...”

“... In fact there is not a lot of spikiness, the line flows pleasingly around Noel Annan and caresses George Weidenfeld, though without forgetting to make his eyes wander and his mouth disappear. Huw Weldon holds his teacup in a very refined way, though his partly averted face is aggressively tense. Clive Jenkins is a smiling serpent, Muggeridge has an accusing ...”

“... desire for direct contact with the public, and the same is true of the novels, in which, as George Eliot put it, ‘he seems to bring his arm-chair to the proscenium.’ Powerful theatre managers had to be dealt with, like Marplay in The Author’s Farce, but according to the theatre historian Robert Hume, ‘Fielding quickly made himself the most ...”

“... divers, roller-skaters, the grower of the largest swede, the carrier of the heaviest hod, the baker of the deepest apple pie, the confectioner of the widest ice-cream sundae, bottomless eaters, legless drinkers, throwers of the farthest ball, peelers of most potent onions, Uncle Tom Cobbleighest winners as far as the eye can see. It ought to be said in ...”

“... own destiny with a high seriousness and purity, they found themselves sharing a ship with Bobby Baker. Mr Baker, who was Lyndon Johnson’s bag-man and fixer within the Democratic Party and throughout the capital city, had been convicted in a sensational trial of tax fraud and conspiracy. His attorney, the no less ...”

“... 1928 Charlotte Mew killed herself by drinking a bottle of disinfectant in a nursing-home near Baker Street. She left behind her a volume of poems, a number of uncollected essays and short stories, and instructions that after her death her main artery should be severed: she had thought a lot about being buried alive. Local newspapers reported the ...”

“... the bewildering number of names she gave herself and those near her (most famously changing Ida Baker into ‘I Lesley Moore’) was an indication of how she used her experiences as experiments to be made real through fiction. Her engagement to a musician, her strange one-day marriage to George Bowden, her subsequent ...”

“... sceptical of these denials, as she is of those of Mansfield’s ‘wife’, the ever-devoted Ida Baker whom Mansfield referred to variously as ‘Jones’, ‘the Mountain’ and ‘the slave’, whom she said often she hated and once said she thought of shooting with her revolver, and whom she would not allow to touch her. This modern ‘we know ...”