“... the holder of one of the three great offices of state, the Home Secretary, could be founded on Sir Edward Coke’s assertion of the sovereignty of the courts in the face of the Crown’s prerogatives, and on Wilkes’s recovery of punitive damages from an earlier Home Secretary, Lord Halifax, for the unlawful issue of a general warrant. A former jobbing ...”

“... Robert​ Louis Stevenson was always ill, that’s what people said, and in the late summer of 1884 he decided he wouldn’t return to the South of France, where he’d spent the past year and a half in a house called La Solitude. His wife, Fanny, sought the advice of his London doctors, who recommended Davos in the Swiss mountains as being cholera-free, but Stevenson fancied southern England ...”

“... Stein admired both Pétain and Franco and had a lifelong aversion to Franklin Roosevelt.) That said, both couples shared the same fundamentally sophisticated outlook on art and life: a love of irony, archness and artistic mischief, and a commitment to modernity in all its forms.All the more stark, then, the contrast in their war experiences. Malcolm begins ...”

“... there is no moment when his father is fully evoked, no moment when anything particular is said about who Sir William Wilde was, and what he did, nothing about how his own search for fame has strange echoes with events in the life of his son, nothing about how Oscar Wilde emerged not, like Jay Gatsby, from his Platonic conception of himself, but from a ...”

“... difficult to take seriously: that utterance has primacy, that the sequence in which things get said is the only one there is, just as the dream is the dreamer’s account of the dream. There is no other scene of telling, and although there may be gaps and hesitations there is no such thing as a digression. Freud told the Swiss pastor Oskar Pfister that ...”

“... known when you’ve got something on your mind. ‘Antarctica – the cruise of a lifetime,’ it said. I sent off for the brochure. In the meantime, I called the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge.‘How can I get to Antarctica?’ I asked.‘Are you a scientist?’‘No, I’m a writer.’It sounded feeble next to the echo of ‘scientist’. The woman ...”

“... disliked his parents may have been that his life veered too close to his mother’s fiction. Among Edward Godfree Aldington’s early gestures of rebellion was his rejection of the name his parents had given him: from his teens he called himself Richard. A sparkling-eyed poet who played rugby at school, he caught the eye of many women. In his youth he had a ...”

“... elite: Michael Manley, the leader of the social democratic People’s National Party, and Edward Seaga, the leader of the conservative Jamaica Labour Party. The Jamaican system of ‘garrisons’ – social housing estates, usually built over bulldozed shantytowns, run by ‘dons’ on behalf of one or other of the parties – was up and running by ...”

“... bait of faits divers. Parisian hoodlums – a particular type known as ‘apaches’ – were said to be keen browsers, partly because the paper loved to relate their fearsome deeds, and in return its editorial line rubbed off on them. They became human parchment for the journal’s opinions: in 1902 the police arrested 15 apaches and found they were ...”

“... only friends in Nashville were white men. She took a trip to Muscle Shoals, Alabama with Edward Donahue in his mother’s ‘majestic old Lincoln. Nella brought some sandwiches. I brought a quart of liquor and the set-ups for high-balls. At Columbia, Tennessee I had to “pass” at a Negro restaurant.’ On another occasion, the police started ...”

“... story about European unification. But the process that resulted in Greek independence could be said to have begun half a century earlier, with Catherine the Great’s defeat of the Ottoman Empire in 1774. This Russian victory had two long-gestating consequences for the Greeks. First, the northern rim of the Black Sea and its farming steppe were opened up ...”

“... as shocking new weapons. General Mark Milley, current chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has said Chinese tests of these technologies constitute a ‘Sputnik moment’. They are more likely to be a sign that China is trying to keep up with American advances in ballistic missile defence. The imperative is to ensure that its nuclear forces can survive a ...”

“... Sometimes to re-create a colourful milieu, as with the unusual hunting novelist Mrs Edward Kennard, who at 50 in 1900 was a keen auto-mobilist: ‘Reviewers liked her slapdash, highly ungrammatical style of writing in which they discerned “lots of go” and a “thoroughly healthy tone”.’ The plots are often more or less absurd, and ...”

“... only as members of the new office-holding and courtly nobility that grew up under Henry VIII and Edward VI. The standard of living to which they then grew accustomed became a heavy burden under Elizabeth, whose favours to the family were intermittent and grudging. From the late 16th century to the late 17th – from the time of Sir Philip Sidney to that of ...”

“... out all his satirical skill. The mixture of ventriloquism and moral insight which he showed in his Edward Pygge parodies is now employed at length to create a fast-moving circus of follies and fantasies which is an acute pleasure to read. It doesn’t matter whether you know the persons James is writing about – the particular becomes the generic in his ...”