“... and daring, of charisma and catastrophe, than an American pilgrim whose journey has taken him from William Buckley’s conservative bastion at the National Review to Harold Hayes’s soft-core liberal stronghold at Esquire, and from a Jesuit seminary to the Henry Luce Chair of American Culture and Public Policy at Northwestern University? At its ...”

“... The ‘popular’ writers are people like Arnold Wesker, H.E. Bates, Kingsley Amis and William Golding. Needless to say, the idioms which the BBC, the newspapers and the ‘popular’ writers are free to indulge in are those which pass the cultural censorship which dictionary-makers themselves exercise. So there is no breaking out of the ...”

“... who worries about the homeless and the hopeless in our inner cities; who found Thatcher’s brand of conservatism to be lacking in humanity; who writes letters which on occasion show real insight and depth of feeling; and who works assiduously in the discharge of his public duties. Thus described, he is probably the most civilised and sympathetic member ...”

“... Road, a narrow two-lane road, one side of it lined with dripping trees. On the other was a brand-new development of large houses, built close together on tiny lots and ornamented with minuscule front lawns and comically topiaried shrubs. Almost at once, we passed a street-sign for Crabtree Avenue. We continued along the narrow road, looking for a spot ...”

“... local languages should be preserved and propagated via printed grammars and dictionaries, men like William Carey in India and Heinrich Schon in West Africa effectively influenced which colonial peoples and cultures became more influential. Moreover, in the process of being reduced to order by translators, clerks and printers, indigenous languages were filtered ...”

“... States. He responded by convening in Whitehall a gathering of ‘eminent authors’, attended by William Archer, J.M. Barrie, Arnold Bennett, A.C. Benson, Hugh Benson, Laurence Binyon, Robert Bridges, Hall Caine, G.K. Chesterton, Arthur Conan Doyle, John Galsworthy, Thomas Hardy, Maurice Hewlett, Anthony Hope, W.J. Locke, E.V. Lucas, J.W. Mackail, John ...”

“... manage the unconscious impulses of Organisation Man, that time-serving drone who – discovered by William Whyte in the Fifties – came fully fitted with the miserable wife, brattish children and off-the-peg infidelities of a Joseph Heller novel that was yet to be written. The creed of excellence has a sun-bleached Californian feel, but it is also tuned into ...”

“... Clyde’s car near Grapevine on Easter Sunday. The papers immediately blamed Bonnie. A local man, William Schieffer, claimed that he saw a woman walk up to a wounded police officer and shoot him repeatedly while his head bounced on the road ‘like a rubber ball’. Bonnie’s murderous reputation was cemented. From now on, Guinn explains, she was seen as a ...”

“... had a part to play in the publicity campaigns which transformed a film director into a media brand. Jan Olsson has shown in great detail how Hitchcock consistently manipulated celebrity gossip in order to project the image of a creative genius who was as much ‘prankster’ as ‘master craftsman’. The biggest prank of all was his own body. Despite ...”

“... state of Sarawak on Borneo as a private fiefdom in the mid-19th century, America produced its own brand of freebooters, including William Walker, the Tennessee doctor who conquered and ruled Nicaragua for ten months and decimated the population of Costa Rica.Until the end of the 19th century the US state was in no position ...”

“... perhaps, in ‘Truth’: Home truths don’t sell. We need a big T Marketed like a leading brand With a catchy name – ‘William Wallace’ or ‘Key – Easy to understand. Commuters from the Cotswolds, Surrey and Hove Voted for it in a booth. Only extremists now could love Scotland more than The Truth. The ...”

“... the occasion for a book on Donne had passed or been seized by others; but lacking time to write brand new lectures, he gave a reduced and somewhat altered version of the old ones as the three Turnbull Lectures at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore in 1933. At that time his main reason for being in America was to give the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at ...”

“... began prosaically enough, with the News of the World’s revelation on 6 November 2005 that Prince William had strained his knee. Its source – William’s voicemail – didn’t make the scoop much more remarkable; British redtops had been listening in to royal phone calls for more than ten years, and earlier tap-and-tell ...”

“... war operated ‘in shades of black and white’ with clear-cut heroes and villains, whereas in his brand of history – which has become a kind of franchise, with this latest volume following his previous bestsellers, Agent Zigzag and Operation Mincemeat – the moral lines are more ‘blurred’ and complex. If Macintyre believes this, he has mistaken the ...”

“... at a period when plain speaking was less allowable than today, he dealt openly with the exacting brand of homosexuality which drew Walpole towards middle-aged married men. Sympathy on the biographer’s part was never confused with commendation of books by Walpole that did not deserve to be commended. Hart-Davis’s office was in Soho Square. Someone said it ...”