“... and his brilliant book The Speakers attracted the admiration of Harold Pinter, William Burroughs, Anthony Burgess, V.S. Pritchett and more, he has gradually achieved the status of super-wizard in a community of nomads, pilgrims and seekers after truth. For two years he successfully ran the Ruff, Tuff, Cream Puff Estate Agency (founded by Wat Tyler in ...”

“... Fiction’, ‘who was in the slot-machine racket, decided to go straight and became a laundromat king, sent his daughter to Bennington, where she married a poet-in-residence or a professor of modern linguistic philosophy ... People speak of the lack of tradition or of manners as having a bad effect on the American novel, but the self-made man is a far richer ...”

“... Samuel Pepys, the Navy Board’s clerk of the acts, was a supporter, while the master shipwright Anthony Deane said Petty’s design ‘must needs prove a folly’. The navy commissioner Peter Pett told Pepys that the double-hulled ship was ‘the most dangerous thing in the world’: if it was successful, the secret would get out, and it would be the ruin ...”

“... through the pages of Valerie Pearl’s valuable study of the London revolution of 1641, or Anthony Fletcher’s equally important analysis of petitioning on the eve of Civil War. It is no paradox to say that we are weighed down with tomes on Puritanism and still lack biographies of Puritans. If we had them, would our explanation of events between 1640 ...”

“... and even transvests Charles I into a baroque Margaret Thatcher, closing seven hundred pages on the King with the words: ‘He believed some principles worth adhering to whatever the repercussions – and well, he may even have been right.’ Russell will compare Ship Money to the Poll Tax, and describe the arrival of James I in London as a foretaste of the ...”

“... bus.’ Unlikely. ‘Stop for lunch in downtown Montgomery. Stand in the pulpit at Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church where Dr Martin Luther King Jr preached.’ My wife and I did stand in the pulpit where Dr King preached, and sat in the church office where he and his colleagues ...”

“... God that on becoming a British subject I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to his Majesty King George VI, his heirs and successors according to law’ seemed not to be a problem. Fuchs is a brilliant mathematician and physicist; he also has an accurate memory and a remarkable ability to explain difficult concepts lucidly. I had some experience of this ...”

“... if Maschler got rich in the process. Wesker’s remarks recalled the pugilist Larry Holmes on Don King: ‘If this is exploitation, keep it rollin’ in.’ Wesker’s affection, however, is measured. After a dispute about whether a play should be published before or after its first performance, the affronted playwright ‘did not speak to me’, Maschler ...”

“... the introduction of modern print technology. We are at the dawn of a new technological age: what Anthony Smith describes as ‘the third revolution in communication’ – the others were the invention of writing and of printing. The computerisation of print through electronic technology opens up the possibility of an abundance of information becoming ...”

“... thing, with a ghastly woodcut on it. Nobody knew how this woodcut got on it. There was a piece by Anthony Powell called ‘A Reference for Mellors’, which was about somebody coming to Lady Chatterley for a reference for a gamekeeper. The magazine sort of launched me on a career, because Alan Pryce-Jones, who was then the editor of the TLS, gave me a lot of ...”

“... of that, and the Express in particular is down on its luck. In the days of Hugh Cudlipp and Cecil King, the Mirror was a wonder to us all – slick, successful and serious about its politics. Its journalists and layout men buzzed round Hugh Gaitskell, seeking to burnish the Labour Party’s shabby image. Now, in 1987, Captain Maxwell does his best when not ...”

“... a fact of life. He wades barefoot through the polluted waters that flood Miami Beach during king tides, visits a family living in the ‘blackwater slum’ of Makoko, just outside Lagos, and interviews Barack Obama during his historic trip to Alaska. The book skips along with the brisk pace of magazine journalism – some of the chapters first appeared ...”

“... their majesties’ heads onto bodies sketched out in conventional Islamic fashion, converting the King Emperor and his consort into something very different from their squat Anglo-Germanic selves. Even when British aesthetics were imported into colonies wholesale meanings shifted. Thomas Metcalf remarks that the Parliament building in Ottawa, like ...”

“... impression that Byzantium matters as and when it pertains to a Latin, Western European history. Anthony Kaldellis will have none of this. He reprehends the terms ‘Byzantine’ and ‘Byzantium’ as the fraudulent legacy of 19th-century scholars determined to claim the heritage of Roman antiquity for (North-) Western Europe, dispossessing its rightful ...”

“... present in his son-in-law Barry Humphries’s autobiography. Both are interested in themselves (Anthony Powell remarks in his memoirs that to be interested in oneself, as opposed to being merely egocentric, is one of the rarest of gifts) but neither takes himself very seriously. So little is Humphries concerned to present an image – the worst thing an ...”