“... Britain by William Klein examines some of the modifications. The picture is further modified by Michael Mendle’s searching essay on the constitutional programme of Charles I’s Parliamentary opponents in 1641-2. In the emergency created by royal mismanagement, Mendle argues, MPs were concerned less to assert legislative rights than to seize executive ...”

“... just behave with politeness – for the rest – she’s had it.’ In his biography of Williams, Michael Freedland gives a fuller account of this incident. He explains the basis of the sketch – two spies complaining about the uselessness of their technical gadgetry – and quotes Fenella Fielding: ‘We both had death pills. I would die first leaving him ...”

“... queer people have. In his survey of gay novels, Griffin leaves out writers from Mary Renault to Gordon Merrick, whose bestselling, sexually daring Charlie and Peter trilogy explores a life-long relationship between two men. He ignores the novels of Iris Murdoch, whose A Fairly Honourable Defeat, from 1970, features one of the most compelling portrayals of ...”

“... as citizens, could not be held to have violated their allegiance by rebellion.In 1781 Lord George Gordon stood trial in London for treason, having provoked anti-Catholic riots in the course of which the townhouse of the presiding judge, Lord Mansfield, had been burned down (a personal interest that appears not to have troubled him at all). Mansfield accepted ...”

“... George Harrison at the dawn of Swinging London. When I interviewed one of the Six Gallery poets, Michael McClure, in 2011, he recalled earlier episodes of Dionysian frenzy with Gerd Stern and a thrash of ‘belly dancers and bongo drums’. Nights that were much closer to Ranald MacDougall’s Hollywood travesty of Kerouac’s San Francisco novella The ...”

“... position where I can consummate the ordeal by the further ordeal of writing it.’ He never did. Michael Hofmann’s The Voyage That Never Ends is not Malcolm Lowry’s, but it puts us as close as anything can to being in a position to assess whether Lowry’s ‘Life Work’, unconsummated and fragmentary as it is, really does have the unity he claimed for ...”

“... of CIA directors have written memoirs: Richard Helms, William Colby, Robert Gates, George Tenet, Michael Hayden, Leon Panetta, Michael Morell, John Brennan. We already have the memoir of the current CIA director, Bill Burns, but not that of his predecessor, Gina Haspel. Perhaps it would be too torture-heavy to be ...”

“... kickstarted this modern mode of engagement, in the cloud forests of southern Mexico in 1955. R. Gordon Wasson, a vice president of J.P. Morgan and amateur mushroom hunter, was convinced that hallucinogenic mushrooms had been used in the sacrament of an ancient and long-suppressed pre-Christian global religion. On the trail of a Mazatec tradition that ...”

“... equivalent ‘little bugger’, not as cowardly a substitution as the author of this biography, Michael Snyder, seems to think. ‘Motherfucker’ was taboo, but also unfamiliar in a British context. ‘Bugger’ was a robust stand-in.Snyder starts his book with Sitwell’s epiphany but acknowledges the exaggeration behind Purdy’s claim that she had saved ...”

“... optimism -‘cheerfulness in the bunker’ – before polling day in the 1874 General Election. ‘Michael Foot might have said it during the 1983 campaign’ is a cheeky aside, given that Jenkins evidently expects his readers to remember who was in which bunker at the relevant moment. There is more to Gladstone, however, than politics. His restless energy ...”

“... the judges, the Scots and the Welsh. There were a couple of weeks in the summer of 2007 when Gordon Brown posed as a modern Leveller. Even Margaret Thatcher had her Norman St John-Stevas, with his ideas about select committees and revitalising Parliament. The Tory-Lib Dem partnership has been noisy enough about civil liberties, constitutional reform and ...”

“... explained in a battery of notes. The most interesting of these comes from the Australian critic Michael Wilding, a distinguished exponent of Marvell, who eliminates some earlier commentary by pointing out that the apples in ll. 23-40 were certainly not pineapples, for pineapples don’t grow on trees. The poem has 40 lines, maybe three hundred words, and ...”

“... as popular as ever among the common complainers (Fowler’s ‘grammatical parrots’). And even Michael Dummett (Grammar & Style) has come out as being vehemently against splitting, arguing that the ambiguities it sometimes causes show that it is ‘intrinsically unnatural’. Dummett also plays a remarkable German trump instead of the usual Latin joker: it ...”

“... calamity beside which another low moment in Labour’s history – the election of 1983, when Michael Foot’s Labour Party was reduced to 209 seats – seems a minor triumph. The electoral massacre of 1931 was the making of Attlee. In the cull of Labour’s big beasts, Ernest Bevin, Arthur Henderson and Herbert Morrison all failed to win seats, but ...”

“... putting the finishing touches to a government reshuffle that would see him shunt his old friend Michael Gove from the Department of Education to a new role as chief whip. In effect he was clearing the decks for the following year’s election and he needed one of his most contentious and least popular ministers to be less visible. Still, he discussed it ...”