“... house behind the Tower of London down Seething Lane. They were to visit one of Sam’s superiors, William Batten, surveyor of the navy. The custom was that women should take the first man they saw as their Valentine, so long as he was no relation. The previous year, Elizabeth had selected her own beau; this time it was all planned to further Sam’s new ...”

“... on what they affectionately call ‘Our Hill’. The President’s secretary, who lives at the White House (and has lived with the President since he was Governor of New York), thinks her boss will be moving into the cottage with her. The President’s wife, another cousin, stays in her own fieldstone cottage on the estate when she is there without her ...”

“... respect and was even displayed in the Louvre when Napoleon was planning to follow the example of William the Conqueror; also that Carlyle’s condemnation of heartless capitalism was prompted by Jocelin de Brakelond’s 12th-century chronicle. But the best example of this dialogue between past and present is the way that the destruction of ancient monuments ...”

“... place in any reputable account of the origins of the ‘Puritan Revolution’; and high time too. William Hunt, whose book is ostensibly about pre-Civil War Essex but really about many things besides, calls it The Puritan Moment. The argument nowadays is not about the political importance of religious conflicts but about their nature. If there is an orthodoxy ...”

“... law, originally intended to discourage slave rebellions, by organising Black and white factory workers. The Herndon case became an international cause célèbre and led to a Supreme Court ruling invalidating the statute as a violation of freedom of speech. (Woodward’s experience working with communists did not escape the notice of the ...”

“... was no percentage in Bill’s advisers bullet-pointing paperbacks composed by a peripatetic, a white man who wrote in black-face. Griffin does not aspire to Easy’s confidential charm, his bright-eyed savvy, his innocence. He’s a white man’s black, darker in spirit, thwarted and confused. And New Orleans, the ...”

“... of military violence with his human rights window dressing. According to an insider account of White House drone policy by the journalist Daniel Klaidman, Koh began lobbying Secretary Clinton and the White House to let him make a speech in defence of targeted killing … The ...”

“... underpinning American culture. In Natty, Lawrence writes, one finds ‘the myth of the essential white America. All the other stuff, the love, the democracy, the floundering into lust, is a sort of by-play. The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic and a killer. It has never yet melted.’ Lawrence thrilled particularly to the bond between Natty ...”

“... Decent people, Teresa Carpenter would assert, aren’t always what they seem. In 1982 William Douglas was working as a cell biologist at Tufts University near Boston, Massachusetts. He was an associate professor on the tenure track, a gifted scientist, and a successful grant-getter. He was married and he lived a quiet suburban life just outside the city with his wife and three children ...”

“... William Fiennes has a deep-seated sense of home and what it means to be distant from it. Birth-house, parents, migrant birds: these fuse in his passage on swifts, for example, which ‘come back each year, in the last week of May’ to his old home somewhere in the south country – a fact which interested me, because I have recorded their arrival since the 1950s in Aberdeen on 11 May and in Cumbria on 6 May ...”

“... make a crash landing in the jungle and crawl out of the wreckage in their Abercrombie and Fitch white safari blouses and tan gabardine jodhpurs and stagger into a clearing. They are surrounded by savages with bones through their noses – who immediately bow down and prostrate themselves and commence a strange moaning chant.    The ...”

“... solid biographies of Eisenhower in two volumes (1983-84) and Nixon in three (1987-91). And though William McFeely won a Pulitzer Prize for his Grant (1981), that did not deter Jean Edward Smith from publishing a massive new Grant (2001), which some politicians have been reading with furtive pleasure because it finds that Gilded Age Administration less corrupt ...”

“... Du Bois’s analysis, he would have been as much a pillar of the sociological canon as the three white European godfathers – they are confident, for example, that The Philadelphia Negro (1899) deserved the acclaim lavished on the Chicago School of the 1920s for pioneering the use of urban ethnography.Historical​ sociologists and Marxists might bristle at ...”

“... here – bedtime, death and marriage – is very impressive, however awful the verse is, and William Empson has a wonderful aside on this subject: ‘I remember believing I should have to die in order to grow up, and thinking the prospect very disagreeable.’ In Burton’s movie the blue hookah-smoking caterpillar grows up in this sense, and reappears ...”

“... and the same holds true for the portraits. Flickers of colour only half follow the folds of the white uniform in The Little Pastry Cook (c.1922-23), which otherwise pursue their own painterly logic; seen in close-up they could easily have been made a few decades later, and it is no surprise to learn that New York School painters such as ...”