“... sought to destroy King’s reputation. With the authorisation of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, the FBI listened in on his phone calls with close associates and planted informers in his circle. Convinced the civil rights movement was a communist plot, J. Edgar Hoover’s G-men gathered recordings of his trysts with women and mailed them to his ...”

“... John Weightman, reviewing Jean-Denis Bredin’s monumental work in the Observer, wrote of the Dreyfus Affair that ‘it was perhaps a good thing for France that the abscess burst when it did, because this brought tensions out into the open and revealed the “undeclared civil war” which would need to be resolved in the 20th century.’ It is, perhaps, a curious notion that there could be any time when it would be ‘a good thing’ for a country to experience a racking political scandal which, over a 12-year period, led to the unparalleled expression of group hatreds, brought about suicides, the ruination of careers and the fall of governments, and which produced anti-semitic riots without number in which Jews were robbed, vilified and killed ...”

“... own presidential stature and coat-tails, as well as his incomparable political intelligence. David Steel might, just conceivably, be capable of playing such a role, but Labour would never accept Liberal leadership of a joint Opposition campaign. Which means one is left with Neil Kinnock – who is incapable of playing such a role. Kinnock may be a nice ...”

“... words throughout the 18th century, especially words from French: this is the time when Samuel Johnson also was worrying that English speakers were starting ‘to babble a dialect of France’. Incorporation of foreign words into a language can be a sign of its lack of vocabulary (Cicero thought Latin needed to borrow from Greek), of its commitment to ...”

“... of Calais, achieved legendary status in his lifetime, and was long revered after his death. Dr Johnson, in his poem London, called on ‘illustrious Edward!’ to survey the current crop of degenerate Britons: ‘Lost in thoughtless ease, and empty show . . . the warrior dwindled to a beau’. Perhaps the only comparable hero in British history has been ...”

“... and how he keeps coming back. T.S. Eliot said he was guilty of ‘crimes against taste’. David Lodge made him a twee subject of nostalgic research for the English hero of Small World, Philip Swallow, hopelessly outgunned by the vulgar but irresistible American, Morris Zapp. Lodge had got his significant detail wrong – Swallow should be a scholar of ...”

“... sense of humour’: a phenomenon everyone considers to be distinctive but no one can define. As David Stubbs writes in Different Times, his impressive survey of British comedy on stage, radio, film and television, ‘it’s not so much a case of Britain producing comedy as comedy producing Britain.’ The book provides a good opportunity to look at our ...”

“... and friend. There are at least two reasons for this. The story has often been told, notably by David Cannadine, of how the long agricultural depression broke the power of the British aristocracy, but it also drove tenant famers and labourers off the land and into the cities and suburbs; a million or more had emigrated by 1914. As a legacy of this flight ...”

“... written when he was still a schoolboy at Winchester, and the much-derided Sir Richard Blackmore. Johnson later respected Blackmore’s The Creation (1712), which for Guest illustrates the route to divine wisdom through demystifying natural philosophy. Guest wisely doesn’t dwell too long on these individual cases, but her categories may occasionally seem a ...”

“... Dryden’s as much as Romantic ‘imagination’ differed from Augustan ‘wit’. But here is Dr Johnson: ‘to write con amore … was … no part of his character.’ Verse starved of parental love may well have problems attracting affection later. T.S. Eliot took a charitable interest in the case in 1921, but his contribution is rather reminiscent of Mr ...”

“... about Carlyle with both authority and imagination is a daunting enterprise. For one thing, Dr Johnson apart, no English man of letters has ever held a higher opinion of the dignity of biography as a literary form, or inferentially expected more from its practitioners. Carlyle’s most famous dictum, ‘History is the essence of innumerable ...”

“... and prestige, rather than new loves or old, the character of The Leopard’s originator emerges in David Gilmour’s entertaining and astute biography. There is at times, but only at times, an excess of reserve – caught from his subject’s own fastidiousness? In the brief, lyrical memoir Lampedusa wrote in 1955, he invoked with unequivocal passion the ...”

“... of Windsor, as soundproof as the walls of all those castles they processed around. Who knew of David Windsor’s dereliction of duty in favour of love (or whatever it was) until a week before the Abdication? Well, quite a lot of people actually, but not the readers of the popular (as in lower orders) press. Marion Crawford, governess to Lilibet and ...”

“... Fourteen inches by 11, and weighing six pounds 13 ounces, David O. Selznick’s Hollywood is less a coffee-table book than a coffee table without legs. Its credits ape a blockbuster movie’s: ‘Executive Producer: Robert Gottlieb – Associate Producer: Martha Kaplan’, etc; and its first page opens like cinema curtains on a wider-than-Panavision main title modelled on Gone with the Wind ...”

“... can have is limited. Forster may be, as Ackroyd condescendingly says, ‘very dull’ and Edgar Johnson ‘awfully wrong-headed’, but they got in well before he did. The pool has been comprehensively scooped. Forster got first dibs on the blacking factory episode. Thomas Wright broke the Ellen Ternan scandal. Edgar ...”