“... has long been a favourite subject for popular biography, and Marozzi’s book follows works by Harold Lamb, Hilda Hookham and John Ure. History writing at this level seeks to provide us with vivid pictures of how things must have been and even, at times, to allow us to enter the minds of the protagonists. Marozzi opens with an account of Tamerlane on the ...”

“... on conquest.’ I believed, and still believe, Madame Tashibekova. As an MP who beseeched James Callaghan, Denis Healey and finally Harold Wilson not to send the troops – particularly the Scots regiments – into Northern Ireland in 1969, and and was told it was a matter ‘only of a few weeks’, I understand how ...”

“... World War One. This precipitated the resignations of two leading historians, Charles Beard and James Robinson, both of whom had long bridled at interference by trustees and college presidents. With some associates at the New Republic, Beard and Robinson hatched plans for a ‘new’ school. ‘New’ was in the air. The New Republic had been founded just ...”

“... Place), the Wests (Fred and Rose), Dennis Nilsen (Des), Jeremy Bamber (White House Farm), Harold Shipman (Doctor Death) – while American true crime favours American atrocities. I don’t see my preference for the British product as some kind of weird patriotism. It’s written into the genre, because the chief frisson of true crime is not suspense ...”

“... the use of parody in this book was also, for me, a way of coping with what the American critic Harold Bloom has called the ‘anxiety of influence’: the sense every young writer must have of the daunting weight of the literary tradition he has inherited, the necessity and yet seeming impossibility of doing something in writing that has not been done ...”

“... edited by Mathews himself (who also funded it with a legacy from his grandfather), Ashbery, James Schuyler and Kenneth Koch. Like most avant-garde magazines, Locus Solus (named after Roussel’s second prose novel, published in 1914, and with an epigraph from his final long poem, from 1932, Nouvelles impressions d’Afrique), was founded primarily as a ...”

“... out of it, or the title of the second anyway. Finn. Finnegan. It was here on 10 June 1904 that James Joyce met Nora Barnacle, who worked in the hotel. The two young strangers who had locked eyes stopped to talk, and they arranged to meet four days later outside the house where Sir William Wilde, eye surgeon to the queen in Ireland, if she should have ever ...”

“... digging coal mines. In the British view, India’s destiny was to remain what Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson called in Why Nations Fail (2012) an ‘extractive colony’. The Raj was seen at its worst in the hardest times, responding to poor harvests and the resulting famines as reluctantly as the home government did in Ireland. The last large-scale ...”

“... cento that is Moby-Dick, there is a passage which might be interpreted as Melville’s response to James Barry’s 1776 engraving The Phoenix or the Resurrection of Freedom. In the engraving Andrew Marvell is depicted with Milton, Locke and Algernon Sidney among the mourners at the bier of Britain’s traditional liberties. Across a pond the mourners can see a ...”

“... by day and by night. No great imaginative leap was required to get from Valley of the Dolls or Harold Robbins to Kelley’s first entry into the lists of homicidal biography, Jackie Oh!, the story of a quiet widow who turned out to be a money-grubbing whore. The new breed of celebrity (and celebrity-monger) that birthed in the 1980s, also girthed in the ...”

“... by a homosexual honeytrap on a trip to Prague. Instead of having Stonehouse prosecuted, Harold Wilson asked him to the Number Ten sitting room for a chat. The prime minister wasn’t inclined to believe the accusations. It turned out that Frolik had never actually met Stonehouse, and there was no evidence that Stonehouse was homosexual. In his ...”

“... Balfour’s niece) and Philip Kerr, Lord Lothian; and he was delighted to play Burke to Harold Macmillan’s Lord Rockingham. Namier affected to despise all ideological ‘isms’ and A.J.P. Taylor spoke of his having taken the mind out of history. Professor Colley not only puts it back in but shows Namier’s thinking to be dominated by Marx and ...”

“... engagée’s entrance into politics was. At a New York publisher’s party in November 1936, James Farrell, author of Studs Lonigan, asked the 24-year-old Mary McCarthy if she thought Trotsky – recently accused, at the Moscow trials, of conspiring with the Nazis to assassinate Stalin and foment a counter-revolution – was entitled to a hearing in his ...”

“... to Reith: ‘One cannot,’ he said, ‘be impartial between the fire and the fire brigade.’ Harold Macmillan is widely credited with being a TV ‘natural’. Mr Cockerell’s account makes him out to be anything but that. Huw Weldon observed after his first broadcast as prime minister that the script ‘could not be spoken by one human being to another ...”

“... skill in proving that film comedy was a commercial goldmine, there would have been no Keaton, or Harold Lloyd, or Harry Langdon. He laid the path along which they swept to success. I wish Robinson had found the space to explain a little about the sad fate of so many of the films. His accounts are based upon seeing the early films in their best surviving ...”