“... Bacon, John Deakin and ‘Dicky’ Chopping, who made a fortune designing the dust jackets for James Bond books, all drank in the Rose & Crown on the quayside at Wivenhoe. Constable condensed the dominant myth of the English countryside in his painting of a haywain standing in a cattle pond a little way to the north. When I arrived at Essex ten years ago ...”

“... told him not to chase after office in an era defined by simple men of crude force like General Grant and, later, Teddy Roosevelt. The money power was rampant; no one valued ‘trained statesmen’. One theme of the Education is that the juggernaut of government, and its temptations and pressures, ruin all who seize power: ‘the distortion of sight – the ...”

“... lawfully do in the exercise of the royal prerogative – declare war, make peace, sign treaties, grant honours, govern colonies – and what requires the authority either of the common law or of Parliament. Over these centuries it has been the rolling back of ministerial claims to arbitrary power, exercised by the use of the royal prerogative, that has ...”

“... Bangladesh’s government, which took office in 1972, was sufficiently grateful to Stonehouse to grant him citizenship. But the bank was problematic. There were regulatory obstacles, and a shortage of cash deposits from British Bengalis. The police started investigating possible fraud, and the pressure on Stonehouse built up. Even though he wasn’t ...”

“... sources,’ he writes, ‘include the hitherto unpublished expedition journals of William Grant Stairs and memoirs of Alice Pike Barney’; he also pays generous tribute to Richard Hall’s earlier biography, ‘a model of hard-nosed and painstaking investigation’. Hall was the first to reveal Stanley’s secret engagement to Alice ...”

“... idea of the modern epoch as the end of civilisation persisted until the Eighties in the work of James Joyce’s former amanuensis, Samuel Beckett. It is implicit indeed in the title of his play, Endgame. The work – today unfashionable – which seemed to authenticate this vision was Spengler’s Decline of the West. Our generation of writers was, very ...”

“... thus armed she embarked on an extraordinary career of conquest. Of her seven husbands only Cary Grant was self-sufficient. The others, a sporty lot, wooed with aeroplanes and pensioned off with palazzos, were toys she picked up and threw away. Some caught her anorexia – dinner might consist of a dozen gin and tonics – and most endured cruel humiliation ...”

“... A man may find Naples or Palermo merely pretty,’ James Elroy Flecker, one-time British vice-consul in Beirut, wrote in October 1914, ‘but the deeper violet, the splendour and desolation of the Levant waters, is something that drives into the soul.’ A month later, Russia, Britain and France declared war on the Ottoman Empire in response to the Turkish fleet’s foolhardy bombardment of Odessa and Sevastopol ...”

“... driven out of English prose: ‘As he wrote and rewrote his sentences, a pencil drawing of Grant which he had found at a bookseller’s in Colchester, looked down ...’ And, from the essay on Beerbohm: ‘If he had a secret it lay in his quite terrific will and the power to live as if he and the people he saw, were farcicial objects.’ He is equally ...”

“... early in 1982 when both the Deputy Editor, Charles Douglas-Home, and the Managing Editor, John Grant, tendered their resignations. The Chairman refused to accept them, and instead asked Evans for his resignation and appointed Douglas-Home to succeed him. After a few days of disorder on the editorial floor, when Evans declared that he was not resigning and ...”

“... out that Dorothy Richardson’s experiments with prose style had something in common with those of James Joyce; you don’t, however, catch anyone applauding Joyce for having written out of the abyss of masculine consciousness, though it might have been said of him with equal pertinence. Most of the studies under review here are concerned to see justice done ...”

“... president of the Union and was hailed ‘the Balliol Demosthenes’. All Souls’ refusal to grant him a fellowship – did the examiners shy at that statuette of the Blessed Virgin on his desk? – left him with a grievance for life. In 1896 he married the American Elodie Hogan in California, after some earlier heavy foot-slogging on that continent. The ...”

“... Briar, Floyd Chaceley, Neal Brose, Pete Redmarley, Ross Wilcox, Gary Drake, ‘Squelch’, Grant Burch, Philip Phelps, Lee Biggs, the Tookey brothers, Ant Little, Darren Croome. There are too many to take in, but almost all of them feature more or less prominently later in the novel, and one of the difficulties of being a teenager, too often ...”

“... till quite the Evening of the Wedding Day.’ Her last poem as a single woman, published in the St James Chronicle in 1763, was entitled ‘Imagination’s Search after Happiness’. It therefore seemed natural to her to use her talents to charm her distant new husband, ‘so Instead of Dressing showily, or behaving usefully – I sate at home and wrote ...”

“... of Netflix, Amazon and YouTube, there are 700 agents at CAA, but the story told in James Andrew Miller’s riveting book is really about the personalities who invented the game. It is, more particularly, the story of what Michael Ovitz gave to the world and what that world took away from him. It’s Citizen Kane to a disco beat with the moral ...”