“... however, readily acknowledged by outsiders. My friends were kind; they wanted to help; and help took the fairly regular form of ringing me up to suggest a meeting. I have always felt vulnerable when answering the telephone, as if I were naked; indeed, sometimes I was naked when it rang. Cravenly, I fell in with any sociable plan that was proffered. This ...”

“... such as Michael Portillo and Peter Lilley and a strange breed of suburban Brylcreem boys – John Moore, Kenneth Baker, Jeffrey Archer and, pre-eminently, Cecil Parkinson. What they have in common is a dreadful smarminess, a smoothly blatant insincerity which apparently nothing can puncture – Baker’s own recent memoirs are one long purr of bland ...”

“... their pretensions, caused him to be at best uneasily regarded by the run of his colleagues and he took care to ensure that no one ever mistook him for one of them. Having decided that difference was his natural lot, Santayana turned it to his advantage. He claimed to consider every topic, including the topics of philosophy, from outside the prevailing ...”

“... qualified would occupy the two highest offices. In 1796 this resulted in the winning candidate, John Adams of the Federalist party, ending up with Thomas Jefferson, leader of the opposition Republicans (not to be confused with today’s party), as vice president. Four years later, the Republican ticket consisted of Jefferson for president and Aaron Burr for ...”

“... Magna Carta that he hoped to export to Sierra Leone. The other English hero of Rough Crossings is John Clarkson, brother of Thomas, a navy officer who had spent his early career in the Caribbean without displaying any qualms about slavery. On returning to Britain in 1783, however, he was swept up in his brother’s campaigns. At the suggestion of ...”

“... the advances in the physical and chemical techniques of the 1930s. The young scientist was John Kendrew, one of many inspired by such conversations to win the Nobel Prize, which escaped his travel companion. But it might have been anyone, male or female, who ever came within earshot of that stumpy, bohemian visionary genius with the uncontrollable head ...”

“... than Americans think they do and a great deal less than British people think Australians do. In John O’Grady’s poem ‘Integrated Adjective’, an Australian in a bar is overheard saying he’s been ‘Up at Tumba-bloody-rumba shootin’ kanga-bloody-roos’. The poet describes the integration of the group around the use of the inte-bloody-grated ...”

“... even of American involvement in it. It is, rather, the story of a collection of people whose paths took them an ocean away from home during a violent time.’ But this is too modest. His account – rather than history – of the war reaches far beyond the American fighters to recover its impact, month by month, on foreign visitors and journalists and on their ...”

“... the White House said, to lobbying by the powerful and unlikely duo of Henry Kissinger and Elton John. Nonetheless Amiel remains furious at the way she and Black have been treated and is intent on establishing his innocence on all counts. Her memoir is a bookend to his, A Matter of Principle, published in 2011, in which he praises her ‘constancy, resolve ...”

“... began by aborting Constitutional change and is ending in a state of Constitutional rigor mortis. John Major’s Government contemplates no political evolution whatever on the mainland, as distinct from in Ireland, and advertises this rigidity as ‘defence of the Union’. When it founders, however, such intransigence will be overtaken by long overdue ...”

“... a weapon Nixon later made his own, while LBJ wiretapped not merely Nixon’s campaign manager, John Mitchell, but Nixon and his running mate, Agnew, too. More blame is laid off on bad advisers, especially Mitchell: ‘by encouraging the macho side of Nixon he created an atmosphere in which bad judgments were too easily made. Nixon the hater; Nixon the ...”

“... loss of her daughter – that fixed her reputation.I never met Didion or her husband, the novelist John Gregory Dunne, but in September 1974 I heard Didion speak one evening in the Branford College common room at Yale. Dunne was there as well, stepping in when her voice began to trail off. I was teaching a non-fiction seminar on Wednesday evenings that year ...”

“... else. Despite the confidently comprehensive title they gave it, the editors of the First Folio, John Heminges and Henry Condell, were defeated by the task of assembling all of their late colleague’s plays: we will never know how many nights’ sleep they lost over their failure to secure a copy of Love’s Labour’s Won, written before 1598 and printed ...”

“... and not everyone wanted the whole thing). The poem appears to have been known in some form to John Ball, one of the leaders of the Great Rising of 1381. Copying always changed texts: scribes made deliberate corrections and accidental mistakes and often translated into their own dialects. Scholars no longer understand these changes as corruptions of a ...”

“... taste’ of Magritte’s house in the Rue des Mimosas in suburban Brussels, Jonathan Miller took off into one of his self-intoxicating fantasies. We were there together in the mid-Sixties to make a film for the BBC, and although I had forewarned him, Jonathan couldn’t believe that this overstuffed furniture, this aviary of china birds, these chiming ...”