“... superior even to the first-class dining-room, was not part of the White Star liner’s inclusive price. Passengers who took their meals there instead of the first-class saloon, paid at the time for what they ate, though they were entitled to apply for a rebate at the end of the voyage. After the sinking of the Titanic, several survivors put in their claims ...”

“... Mrs Graham to change her paper’s policy, while the President was using his principal aide, Jack Valenti, to bombard her with protests against the Post’s coverage of Vietnam. (Years later, in his memoirs, Valenti wrote that Katharine Graham, ‘a thorough-going professional who does her homework and knows her business’, endured his calls ‘wearily ...”

“... the United Kingdom parliament. Sharing devolved government with the Liberal Democrats is a small price to pay for that. Seven years on from the first elections to the Scottish Parliament, it seems that devolution has soothed the nationalist itch. Yet, as Iain McLean and Alistair McMillan recognise in their study of the unionist political tradition, this ...”

“... credible chains of motive and causation were beyond him. He was a writer of the ‘With one bound, Jack was free’ school; the gun that inexplicably jams, the knock at the door at the very second the blade is about to fall were his stock-in-trade. But abundance trumps incoherence, and it can’t be denied that an awful lot happens in The Forbidden ...”

“... their audiences with tales of the devastation being brought by advances in copying technology. Jack Valenti, the impressively lifelike head of the Motion Picture Association of America – one-time former fixer in the LBJ White House, recently chair of the Hollywood summit to discuss ways of supporting the war against terrorism – curdled our blood twenty ...”

“... Hadley, the Thatcherite singer in an otherwise left-leaning band, was holding a glass of Jack Daniels. He seemed in touch with his audience and every bit as drunk. I’m not sure whether the audience knew his politics, but they heard the totemic sound of the 1980s in his voice, and a thousand facets of contemporary Britain seemed to sparkle in his ...”

“... Hyland enjoyed marvellous success with his ‘dramatick piece’ The Ship-Wreck of 1746, in which Jack Lookout and Tom Plunder prey on the ship of Captain Bluff, entangling Farmer Careful with the bureaucrats Mr Search’em and Mr Pick’em. There is as much hauling-to-mainsail, Huzzah!-ing, and whoring as you would hope, with a dash of political commentary ...”

“... pay with wooden tokens from the plantation. Sammie’s talents make him a target for Remmick (Jack O’Connell), a vampire, and his newly undead associates, a Klan couple whose racism Remmick uses for his own purposes (like so many politicians and industrialists before and since). Remmick was turned centuries before, in Ireland, by a rapacious, colonising ...”

“... state of near-mystical terror about the invasion and pillaging of her brain, ‘her treasure whose price he, not more than the nurses, could estimate’. In some way Stafford felt herself not only damaged but violated. Yet she fought against understanding her own anger, diverting it as much into meanness and booze as into art; indeed, she would have been ...”

“... one important difference, however. Sutcliffe’s case acted itself out as a reprise of the case of Jack the Ripper, which has lodged itself so tenaciously in the English folk memory: it was a kind of flashback to Victorian England, set in a similar milieu of urban blight, urban deprivation, prostitution, hypocrisy and misogyny. A substantial part of the ...”

“... Object lessons included plum pudding, Saint George and the Dragon, posting a letter and the Union Jack. The school calendar was shaped by its special occasions: not just the annual tea provided by the Bonds up at Tyneham House, but the duly observed days of church, nation and state. On Empire Day the school was addressed by a visiting speaker, who ‘tried to ...”

“... all its beliefs were crumbling: Jill was in a good position to know how shaky was the house that Jack built. It was a frequent theme of later writings that ‘God had chosen a woman to save France.’ Part Two of the book is called ‘The Afterlife of Joan of Arc’, a story as remarkable in its way as her real life on earth. It was an excellent idea to ...”

“... thought them to be. Iago, however, protects himself more radically. He refuses (at a terrible price) ever to commit himself to another person, to admit any capacity for suffering, or an openness to feelings which cannot be controlled by the will. Although Othello as Tragedy occasionally seems rather long-winded and repetitive, Ms Adamson’s detailed ...”

“... and sisters were IRA activists, many of them high up in the organisation; Eileen’s brother Jack Lynch was the commanding officer who orchestrated the bombing campaign in England in 1939 which killed six civilians and seriously injured 55. Cheated of his farm inheritance by a series of blunders and family quarrels, Jim O’Neill earned a living as a ...”

“... all it owes to the freedom fighters that came from the United States of America and everywhere’. Jack Straw took up the theme, declaring: ‘Britain is also a very old country. It was founded in 1066 – by the French.’ Colin Powell had to concede that ‘America is a relatively new country,’ before going on to remind his audience that ‘it is the ...”