“... both landed and unlanded ways of being far from the madding crowd). Gabriel has been signed on as cook, and she can scarcely separate the actual voyage from the recording of it, which she does daily and religiously by speaking into a tape recorder and sending the tapes home to her mother in England. She is, perhaps, the representative of that dubious ...”

“... he decided he was a suitable recruit for the voyage to the South Seas on which he and Captain Cook would shortly be setting forth. Such a voyage was sure to turn up an abundance of plants and animals new to science, and artists were required for the purpose of making an on-the-spot record of the living appearance of specimens which the collecting methods ...”

“... town. He was maybe our unluckiest genius.’ (It’s hard not to see echoes of the career of Peter Cook, who also peaked early: he reached the limits of his marvellous talent while still in his twenties, and thereafter turned to drink to cope with the sense of anti-climax, the inability to top – though why should he? – what was already a matchless ...”

“... Kungsholm, pride of neutral Sweden, was sold in mid-war to America, converted to trooping as the John Ericsson, then sold back after the war to her original owners. In a burst of postwar activity, before the jet age took over, the Americans made the running on the Atlantic. In 1952 the United States, ‘long believed … fast enough to exceed the US highway ...”

“... half. Relief at home at this time was intermittent, Vaizey reports, since poor Mrs Macleod had to cook for the ‘cannibals’. Nevertheless, Macleod was the most successful of the four politicians. Boyle and Crosland both gathered ill-will at Education, trying to effect the re-organisation of the secondary schools. Crosland did some characteristically clever ...”

“... that he had believed his client to be totally innocent all along. As my friend and former landlord John O’Sullivan used to be fond of saying (and him a Catholic and all, and editor of the National Review) if the Pope says he believes in God, he’s only doing his job. If he says he doesn’t believe in God, he may be onto something. And Cochran brings me to ...”

“... shadowed by Charlie Chaplin, who seems to have been on everyone’s guest list. Lawrence knew John and Susan Buchan, country-house owners of the new weekending sort, and spent his time with them talking about ‘the Arabs … his muddled masochism and his … disillusion’; Baldwin appears at Warwick Castle and at Madresfield, which was in part the model ...”

“... literary achievement. His ‘failure’, if it can be called such, lay in undervaluing his gifts. John Jay Chapman blamed Adams and his fellow ‘dilettanti’ for admiring America too much and despising her too much: ‘They could not help bowing the knee to success, though they did so with a sneer upon their lips.’ The letters bear him out. Adams made ...”

“... great charm, particularly in the section titled ‘With Friends like These’, where a visiting cook performs a minor miracle, turning pot-au-feu into Boeuf Bourguignon before our very eyes. A modern version of water into wine? Ms Ortiz Taylor knows what she thinks, and has the formal ingenuity to convey it. But the restless contemporaneity of her vision ...”

“... a sort of political bible with Sir Richard Scott in the role of the Yahweh/ Saviour and Robin Cook and Ian Lang fighting it out to play St Paul. In fact, the occasional double negative aside (these alone have been enough to drive our illiterate media into hysterical denunciations of prolixity), the Report is a model of clarity. Its narrative is compelling ...”

“... the country in search of old records that a handful of them – Skip James, Son House, Mississippi John Hurt – were ‘rediscovered’. They became draws on the coffee-house and festival circuit, while recordings by John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, who had made their names playing house-rocking, amplified ...”

“... fictional death was perhaps intended as a protective measure because neither her supposed father, John Pemberton, nor her real father was of much use to her. In the novel Peregrine, on being told of Sophia’s pregnancy, ‘put on a very sad face, then put his face in his hands, but he cheered quite soon and said, “Perhaps it will be born dead.”’Comyns ...”

“... Protestantism that had made too many compromises with the modern world. More than a decade later John Gray, disillusioned with Thatcherism, proposed post-liberalism as a new path; more important, the English Anglican (leaning heavily Anglo-Catholic) John Milbank radicalised the theological project, breaking with liberal ...”

“... On 15 June 2009, Gordon Brown announced an inquiry into the Iraq war – to investigate, as Sir John Chilcot, the inquiry’s chairman, put it, ‘the UK’s involvement in Iraq, including the way decisions were made and actions taken, to establish, as accurately as possible, what happened and to identify the lessons that can be learned’. Although oral ...”

“... trail. Would Labour’s disaster of 5 May have happened if any of its best and brightest – Robin Cook, Douglas Alexander, Alistair Darling, Gordon Brown, even John Smith – had stayed in Scotland to lead the party and the devolved government at Holyrood? Only Donald Dewar took the train back north and became first ...”