“... the cruise of the Nahlin, for instance, in 1936 when Duff Cooper and his wife accompanied the King and Mrs Simpson around the Mediterranean. Years ago Russell Harty had supper with Diana Cooper and she told him that she and her husband had had the adjoining cabin to the royal couple (or rather one royal, the other not) and that she had had her ear pressed ...”

“... Five. By the early 1950s, I was tearing at speed through the middlebrow bestsellers of the time: John Creasey, Nevil Shute, the wartime adventures of British officers who’d escaped, or tried to escape, from German POW camps, like The Wooden Horse and The Colditz Story, along with a stream of books about fishing. The nearest I came to reading ...”

“... the rule of Naples, founded their own Sicilian parliament, which in April 1848 deposed the Bourbon king in Naples, Ferdinando II. But the assemblies were merely one theatre of action. By the summer of 1848, they were coming under pressure, not just from the monarchical executives in many states, but also from a range of more radical groups: networks of clubs ...”

“... Middlemarch, this ‘line of work is very deep indeed’.Few are better suited to this work than John Guillory, the deep man’s deep man. His Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation, published in 1993, is one of the most admired and influential studies in the humanities in recent decades. The hallmark of his work has been to engage ...”

“... country – Churchill most obstinately of all. Guy Burgess was one of those – James Klugmann and John Cornford were the chief – who helped to induct me into the Party. We belonged to the same college, and hence to the same ‘cell’. I remember Burgess as a rather plump, fresh-faced youth, of guileless, almost cherubic expression. I heard him spoken of as ...”

“... and a solid track record. Both the DNC hacking story and the one involving the emails of John Podesta, a Clinton campaign operative, involve a shadowy bunch of putatively Russian hackers called Fancy Bear – also known among the technically inclined as APT28. The name Fancy Bear was introduced by Dimitri Alperovitch, the chief technology officer of ...”

“... Winston Churchill on political history, Edward Elgar on music, Gabriel Pascal on film direction, John Reith on the BBC, and especially actors on acting (he was fond of them much in the way one is fond of children: they needed discipline as well as praise). His tone is often what might have been found offensive had people not come to expect it as part of the ...”

“... you prefer the Brady Bunch to the Partridge family, for instance, as Uma Thurman wants to know of John Travolta in Pulp Fiction, is simultaneously a test, a cultural allusion and a send-up of the whole idea of culture. The funniest moment in Pulp Fiction concerns Harvey Keitel, come to clean up after John Travolta and ...”

“... like CinemaScope: a convex width of competing concessions, desert, rubber-on-concrete, Burger King, bougainvillaea, orange blossom. Sallis, a soft-spoken courteous man with a minimalist tidemark of grey beard, had met me at the airport. He’d just returned from a rare outing to New York, where he’d been presenting a television documentary on Chester ...”

“... the document which was to prove the beginning of the end for any hope of autonomy. The French king agreed to recognise Haiti’s independence only if the new republic paid France an indemnity of 150 million francs and reduced its import and export taxes by half. The ‘debt’ that Haiti recognised was incurred by the slaves when they deprived the French ...”

“... but was a blockbuster bestseller, popping to number one on the fiction list just ahead of John le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. We shall never see the noble likes of such bestseller lists again. Twenty years after his debut with Dangling Man (1944), after an already notable run that included The Adventures of Augie March (his ...”

“... everyone with boisterous condescension,’ Chester Himes remembered. ‘It was obvious he was the king thereabouts.’His place on the throne was shakier than he imagined. The novels he wrote in Paris, where he would spend the rest of his life, failed to deliver on the promise of Native Son, the incendiary tale of a poor black chauffeur in Chicago, Bigger ...”

“... like this, and the Portuguese got much of what they wanted. Vasco da Gama also gave the kindly king his first experience of being bombarded by a new European device: the cannon. As time passed and Europe’s military technology outstripped that of its rivals, the need and capacity for furia grew obsolete. It belonged to times when European invaders and ...”

“... the nation that existed between Margaret Thatcher’s ‘there’s no such thing as society’ and John Major’s ‘it’s time to understand a bit less and condemn a bit more.’ I felt for the boy being led away but also for the boys leading him, and I believed there was not only a terrible death beyond what we could see there, but lives too, the life of a ...”

“... to the public at large. Impatience with the old ways had spread far beyond the media. Sir John Hunt, a former cabinet secretary, broke cover as early as election day 1983 to voice the discontents of the mandarins:In the absence in our system of a chief executive with his own supporting staff, a ‘hole in the centre’ of government was perceived ...”