“... feast for an analytical historian. For now, everything in Washington has narrowed to a saying of John Kennedy’s, uttered after the Bay of Pigs, to the effect that ‘success has many fathers – failure is an orphan.’ The debate in Congress, which was very protracted and in some ways very intense, was in reality extremely limited. The partisans of the ...”

“... of notice. Her autobiography, A Servant of the Queen, stops around the time of her marriage to John MacBride in 1902, when she was 36. (The queen in question is of course Cathleen ni Houlihan, not Victoria.) There are two biographies, by Samuel Levenson (1976) and Nancy Cadozo (1977), and, like the excellent notes and introductions in the present ...”

“... use his leg muscles again – ‘to tense the quadriceps’, to feel again that earlier power that took him to Norway, that took him to the bull. And it is gone. It’s being gone also allows Sacks to reconnect himself to his internal account of the history of neurology, since he has become a sufferer from Babinski’s ...”

“... as anything else about him. (The idea was already becoming familiar in the performing world, where John Barrymore, notably, had played out the end of his career surrounded by idiot-boards as an openly bog-eyed parody of his younger self.) It was in the Fifties, then, that America’s taste-makers finally stopped resisting the attractions of dissolution and ...”

“... was sustained by the use of strategies including the exposure of unwanted infants. Christianity took shape in part by reacting against the values of the age, in part by internalising them. Christians across the ages have put an awful lot of effort into avoiding sex altogether. Celibacy wasn’t particularly prized in the ancient world, but in ...”

“... in terms of structure and function rather than in terms of themes such as power. Business history took as its unit the firms of which the economy was composed; urban history centred itself on communities within a defined space and subject to sub-national government. The two were of course related, for until well into the present century British cities were in ...”

“... mathematical wizard. He never had a permanent job, gave away money he made in excess of his needs, took to offering small money prizes for problems that caught his fancy, never learned to cook, drive a car, wash his clothes or become anything other than an appalling house guest, who thought little of waking his hosts in the middle of the night to shut his ...”

“... mischievous matchmakers, innocent fun, uileann pipes, sea-wind in the hair. Even if you swap John Ford’s Ireland for something more urban and contemporary, say that of Roddy Doyle, in which a good night out is more likely to involve soul music and a ‘ride’, it is still possible to find yourself idealising: Ford and Doyle (pre-Paddy Clarke and ...”

“... boasted about their powerful contacts in the Tory Party and the Government. Greer even mentioned John Major as ‘a close friend’. The programme-makers arranged further such meetings, one in a Spanish castle, to which Greer was asked to invite his contacts. Greer’s network of helpful politicians was about to be exposed when Central Television and its new ...”

“... vacuous, escapist and pernicious. Combine this with the shyly smiling face of Leah Betts, who took ‘just one tablet’ on her 18th birthday and promptly died, and you have a powerful story. Here is a drug that transforms your daughter from a well brought-up girl into a banshee nymphet, and in the process could very possibly kill her: a persuasive ...”

“... rewriting A Vision and working on many of the astonishing poems of the ‘Byzantium’ period. It took several fruitless enquiries to locals, and then a lengthy investigation by a Tourist Office official who eventually disinterred a file of literary notes, to find that Yeats’s Via Americhe has changed its name, like much in Rapallo. Even the little ...”

“... at the tasks that two spinster ladies ‘of feeble constitution and rather nervous temperament’ took on. Indefatigable and undaunted, they ventured to places as ‘dark as Africa’. The glass-house workers of Nailsea lived in a row of 19 ‘hovels’, with about ten inhabitants in every house. Both sexes and all ages herding together; voluptuous beyond ...”

“... reverted to resembling, in the American mind, something far worse than partes infidelium. The John Birch Society, an important orchestrator of American paranoia in the 1950s, was named for an American missionary who had supposedly been martyred by the Reds. Indeed, the Cold War and McCarthyite atmosphere in the United States was attributable much more to ...”

“... Assembly and the London mayoral contest were notable examples. Well before the 2001 election, John Kampfner described Cook as an isolated figure forced to recognise both that he would never succeed Blair as party leader, and that he had been decisively out-manoeuvred by his long-term political rival Gordon Brown.* Strongly influenced by the media furore ...”

“... I lose my Drag Race virginity. Season 14 was midway through; over the course of two evenings, he took me through the first seven episodes, each an hour long.Back on my own sofa, I returned to Season 1, first broadcast in 2009. I cantered through to the Season 5 finale. Over the next twelve months, I watched all fifteen seasons of US Drag Race, then all ...”