“... to say, he is most at ease with the thinkers and legislators who abhorred the practice. In 1613 James I issued a Proclamation prohibiting the publishing of reports or writing on duels and appointed Francis Bacon as attorney general, inviting him to put a stop to the practice. Bacon described the duel as a brutal urge for revenge dressed up in Italian ...”

“... in the style of the Ladies’ Home Journal, dismissed by modernist-minded critics like Edmund Wilson, and accused in 1933 by Granville Hicks, a ubiquitous critic then in his Marxist phase, of falling ‘into a supine romanticism because of a refusal to examine life as it is’. She received buckets of mail from priests who saw themselves in Death Comes ...”

“... collaborators) that he declared he was giving up theatre to write mystery novels. He rallied after James Lapine, a new collaborator, suggested doing something about Seurat and his painting of a Sunday afternoon at la Grande Jatte. That show ran for 604 performances, yet its ten Tony nominations led only to design prizes – there really is a Broadway faction ...”

“... a sympathetic biography by Peter Conradi, which may be too kind to her, and a sour memoir by A.N. Wilson from which even the concept of kindness appears to be absent. What with John Bayley’s Iris and the film of it, and all the ‘coo wasn’t she a one’ coverage of her sex life, she has had too much press as the novelist who did a lot of shagging and ...”

“... the ballot box’ to determine whether Britain should join. After winning the election, Harold Wilson renegotiated Heath’s terms of entry, then put the deal before the electorate in a referendum in 1975. His appeal to popular sovereignty immediately generated a distinctive kind of non-parliamentary politics. While the prime minister campaigned for a yes ...”

“... throne was the second major misfortune of her life. (Her brother’s death was the first.) When James II fled to France in 1688 she followed his court into exile in St Germaine-en-Laye, just outside Paris. She wasn’t an aristocrat like those other royalists Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, and Anne Finch, Countess of Winchelsea, she was ‘an ...”

“... And if I do so, it is because my version of events has a relevance to the immediate past when James Callaghan agreed to Chevaline without telling most of the Cabinet, let alone the Labour Party, and when Margaret Thatcher with the solitary aid of Cecil Parkinson conducted the major decisions of the Falklands War. It so happens that Arthur Tedder was a ...”

“... Later in the book, describing a weekend journey to the countryside to meet his new amanuensis, James Adams, Neil gives a pretty clear idea of how he likes to see himself: ‘James,’ Neil writes, ‘was surprised when somebody his own age emerged one sunny Sunday in shorts and open-necked shirt from a black convertible ...”

“... His present-day biographer inherits a tradition of controversy dating back a full hundred years. James Anthony Froude, the first of the succession, had been Carlyle’s friend and disciple for thirty years, and it was to him that Carlyle entrusted the keeping of his posthumous fame. As he worked over his master’s papers, Froude never forgot his ...”

“... of pen-portraits, beginning with his corpse-side meditations on the death of his artisan father James (‘the sunk pillar on which mine was to rise’) in 1832 and of Jane 34 years later, taking in her early admirers Edward Irving and Francis Jeffrey, and winding up with more controlled recollections of Wordsworth, Southey, ‘Christopher North’ (John ...”

“... History of England. An unattributed notice in the London Chronicle which praised a work by James Boswell as ‘a book of true genius’ was written by Boswell himself. John Wilson wrote an anonymous letter to Blackwood’s Magazine robustly defending Wordsworth from some unsigned criticism in a previous issue of the ...”

“... into defensive ‘bastions’ in home waters under the ice. In The Silent Deep, Peter Hennessy and James Jinks recount the history of the Royal Navy Submarine Service since 1945. Naval history as such is a new departure for Hennessy, but in his extensive writings on politics and society, nuclear power and nuclear weapons, and intelligence and state secrets, he ...”

“... her to read H.P. Lovecraft’s horror stories in much the same way he recommends students to try a James Bond novel. All the same, H.P. Lovecraft – with his fatuous ghoulishness, revived and found modish in the 1970s – brings his influence to bear on the seventh chapter. The female students are cute and dinky, with their bright-coloured, tasteless food and ...”

“... a quarter of a century ago, supplies one clue. The narrator is set off by a recollection of Henry James, who after fifty years remembered ‘a boy cousin being sketched in the nude at Newport before his life was “cut short, in a cavalry clash, by one of the Confederate bullets of 1863” ’.Death, summer, youth – this triad contrives to haunt me every ...”

“... That bloody woman!’ James Hamilton-Paterson’s mother was not given to outbursts. Then in her eighties, she had worked in the National Health Service for most of her life. But when she came across the three teenage girls (they might have been her own granddaughters) sitting on cardboard and begging in Victoria Station, something gave way ...”