“... and, in all probability, the political editor Adam Raphael. If he hasn’t sacked them yet, it may only be because he finds himself strapped in by the conditions attached to the sale of the paper. But Rowland is a very determined character – as is shown by his relentless fight with the House of Fraser over the future of Harrods. He is the kind of man ...”

“... He was mad, but he was not just mad. There is more to know. This is the historical lacuna that Richard Noll exploits in his disturbing and often illuminating book. Noll comes to the quest for the historical Jung – his phrase – with a broad background in Jungianism, psychiatry and shamanism and his training stands him in good stead much of the time. He ...”

“... expulsion orders, 25 registration orders and ten prohibition orders were made, and by the end of May 1940, a total of 167 expulsion orders had been made, statistics which ignore the substantial emigration of the Irish from Britain following the Act. Originally due to expire on 28 July 1941, it was kept in force until the end of that year under wartime powers ...”

“... remembers the young and handsome John F. Kennedy’s triumph in televised debates with his rival Richard Nixon. According to legend, Nixon lost the 1960 election by his refusal to put on makeup before the broadcast. One of the more subtly interesting moments in Mad Men occurs when we see an actual Kennedy TV spot, pulled from the archives, screened in the ...”

“... that when Sir Henry Wyatt, father of the poet Sir Thomas Wyatt, was imprisoned in the Tower by Richard III he was fed by a cat which brought him a dead pigeon. In Wolf Hall this piece of family mythology becomes a tale that Sir Henry, on the edge of retirement, relates himself, with a rheumy twinkle of unreliability in his eye. A factually implausible ...”

“... should take them at face value.’ The de rigueur response to such a claim is provided by Richard Poirier: ‘Fred’s created a character named Frederick Seidel that has little to do with who he is.’ In a review of The Cosmos Poems, Calvin Bedient obligingly clears his throat before contending with the unpleasant poetry: ‘However fictive and ...”

“... family, as in: ‘All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way’ (Richard Pevear/Larissa Volokhonsky). The implied proposition is that happy families are not much use to a novelist, and the next sentence confirms this view. ‘All was confusion in the Oblonskys’ house.’ Very promising. Throughout his life Vladimir Nabokov ...”

“... of a guillotine blade terminates any simple-minded reveries. The constant flow of objurgation may have functioned as a relief from the mental pressure of it all, but if so, the reprieve was temporary. In December 1966 he hit rock bottom. He was ‘extraordinarily depressed’, unable to get up in the morning, condemned by his ‘outsider’ status to ...”

“... political reform. In ‘a bright day, of which we already behold the dawn,’ he announced, ‘we may look forward with confidence to a state of society in which the different orders and classes of men will contribute more effectively to the support of each other than they have hitherto done.’ The essential structure of society, however, would remain ...”

“... by the Palestrina Choir in Dublin between 1898 and 1901. It also informed the revivalist work of Richard Runciman Terry after he became responsible for music at Westminster Cathedral in 1901. Terry clearly agreed with Bordes when he wrote that ‘modern individualistic music, with its realism and emotionalism, may stir ...”

“... confess to ignorance about the mood of ordinary citizens in August 1914. Those who marched to war may also have had illusions, but these were soon brutally shattered. How did they cope, why did they continue, what did it all mean to them, what did it do to their patriotism, their religion, their views about authority, their politics and social or class ...”

“... proportionately, as in the European armies and I found myself remembering from The Last Enemy Richard Hillary’s friend Noel Agazarian, shot down in his Spitfire in 1940. The death in action of already well-known writers like Charles Péguy and Alain-Fournier seems like an accident: it is the younger ones who have the besoin de la fatalité, and are ...”

“... more devious and ruthless – and certainly more hypocritical – than either Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon. Both Reeves and Beschloss show the risks Kennedy took in his liaisons, which exposed him to blackmail, not least by his own FBI head, J. Edgar Hoover. During the Second World War Kennedy became involved with someone with Nazi sympathies, while as ...”

“... who, according to a tradition Hughes doesn’t mention, ‘died a papist’ – the insight may not be original but it needs restating forcibly in a culture where Shakespeare is so often treated as a piece of Anglican heritage or as a second-rate Tory dramatist. It’s an applied insight which gains authority not just from the active excitement of ...”

“... constrain the individual: history, imperial grandeur, Classicism, high culture – even villages. (Richard Hofstadter once explained how the ceaseless lure of land inhibited the growth of village settlements and led to the habit of continually pulling up stakes.) Repeatedly, in diaries, journals, letters, ‘official’ histories, promotional tracts and works ...”