“... book in recent memory expressly to demand recognition for Kingsley Amis as a moralist; the other, John McDermott’s, is actually called Kingsley Amis: An English Moralist. McDermott says ‘moralist’ clearly and right away, whereas Salwak’s subtitle sounds like one of Amis’s phonetic reports on the way a drunken man might have struggled to get the word ...”

“... negotiating with yet more big corporations for the privatisation of yet more prisons; ‘bluff John’ Prescott, the authentic voice of proletarian Old Labour, who made it ‘crystal clear’ to the 1993 Labour Party Conference that a Labour Government would renationalise the railways if the Tories privatised them, and promised, for instance, that the ...”

“... For Mendoza​, the ambitious courtier in John Marston’s The Malcontent (1603), being in favour is ‘delicious heaven’; he is quite ‘drunk’ with it. Walter Raleigh pined like a spurned lover when Elizabeth I turned her attentions to the Earl of Essex. George Villiers, first duke of Buckingham, told James VI and I that what they enjoyed together was ‘more affection than between lovers in the best kind ...”

“... that others regard as shameful. They are powerless to resist sexual exploitation or abuse by their masters. It is not so much these actions themselves, as the stories to which they give rise and which give them meaning, that interest Gilsenan. ‘Men struggle to reproduce, memorialise and guarantee narratives of being and place in the world against the ...”

“... to have had his heart in the cause for which, eventually, he suffered. What interested his foreign masters was his closeness to the Palace, where he looked after the pictures. He had chats with the King, whom he liked, knew his wife well enough to despise her, and even carried out a secret postwar royal mission to Bavaria. ‘Your value for us,’ said his ...”

“... or swim with Ngo Dinh Diem’ was a recipe for failure. In July 1964, however, he was asked by John McNaughton, the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, to join him in the Pentagon as his special assistant. The Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, had given McNaughton responsibility for co-ordinating strategy towards ...”

“... For some in the audience, this was more than enough. ‘That means nigger citizenship,’ John Wilkes Booth told his companions. Three nights later, he followed the president to Ford’s Theatre and shot him in the head. On the morning of 11 April, Lincoln met privately with General Benjamin Butler of Massachusetts. The subject of the meeting went ...”

“... are those which exclude the mots of the compiler himself. The tendency to line oneself up with the masters may be studied in Bartlett’s Unfamiliar Quotations, compiled by Leonard Louis Levenson, which contains more than a hundred and eighty entries credited to L.L.L.; in A Treasury of Humorous Quotations, compiled by Herbert V. Prochnow and Herbert ...”

“... so he acquaints himself with this ‘testicular view’. One story in particular strikes him: John Cheever’s ‘The Country Husband’. The force of it disorients him, he realises, because in twenty sad, brilliant pages it demolishes the allure of the things for which he most longs: ‘husbandhood and fatherhood and a certain kind of woman who attached ...”

“... with Cubism. The education minister, José Vasconcelos, sent him to Italy to study the Old Masters; somehow it was thought that the narrative power of the grand tradition of painting, given over to biblical scenes, powerful lords and wealthy bankers, could be retooled to depict a post-revolutionary Mexico. When Rivera returned to Mexico in 1922 with ...”

“... one voice sings. These madrigals display the individual voice very differently from those of, say, John Dowland (who was ten years younger than Monteverdi). From the 1580s to 1620, Dowland wrote wonderfully for the single voice. He was a consummate polyphonist, but his music was informed by his knowledge of his own instrument – the lute – whereas ...”

“... the fashion – of the time. The idea is to teach the young to think and argue, and the real past masters at it (Harry Weldon was always held up as an example to me) were those who first argued undergraduates out of their received opinions, then turned around after a time and argued them out of their new-found radicalism, leaving them mystified as to what ...”

“... period. By the mid-century touring exhibitions were taking some popular English pictures such as John Martin’s Great Day of his Wrath as far as America. Frith’s Derby Day even reached Australia. Hyperbolic publicity was circulated which boasted of the time consumed in making these pictures, the painstaking search for ‘authenticity’, the number of ...”

“... his innate caution in strategic affairs, his lack of ruthlessness when dealing with his political masters, and his frequent inability to communicate with them adequately – defects well brought out in this book – make it understandable that his undoubted talents were so regularly dispensed with. Wavell’s significance today lies less in his dispiriting ...”

“... but contemporary artists are nonetheless frequently invited to perch on the tombs of the Old Masters, brandishing testimonials of long-standing devotion as evidence of the continuing ‘relevance’ of museums. Half a century or so ago, by contrast, avant-garde artists and their champions strove to present their work in separate spaces, to create museums ...”