“... roster of American writers, including Robert Coover, Don DeLillo, Philip K. Dick, Joseph Heller, Thomas Pynchon, Ishmael Reed, Philip Roth and Garry Wills – whose analyses of Nixon, Reagan and Wayne blazed the trail for Nixon at the Movies – took him on as a character. Pundits have searched for literary antecedents (Uriah Heep, Tartuffe, Richard ...”

“... course the clay breaks and the bronze goes on.’ What was true of those monastic summers was even more true of Lowell’s relationship with women. In love as in friendship Lowell was controlling and vulnerable, caring and neglectful, destructive and helpless to fix the damage. He was married three times: to Jean Stafford from 1940 to 1948, to Elizabeth ...”

“... aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, which were characterised by spectacular marine battles.’ In more surrealist mode, a painting by the Czech artist Zdeněk Burian showing a confrontation between a plated and spiked stegosaurian and a surprised-looking Antrodemus is given a psychological reading: ‘Violent arguments between Burian’s parents marred his ...”

“... But he was tickled by the idea of life as a moviemaker.His next film, Days of Heaven (1978), was more flagrantly beautiful and even more widely admired. It’s the story of an outlaw trio fleeing from a murder committed in a factory in Chicago in 1916, and coming to rest at the prairie ranch of a wealthy farmer. The ...”

“... which actually appeared before I had to stop looking. Even so, the figures reveal an average of more than one fairly substantial discussion for every day since publication.Fourteen reviews appeared on the day of publication or on the first possible day after in the case of the Sunday papers or other non-dailies. Two others appeared on what might effectively ...”

“... exceeded the length originally agreed to, possibly hoping, but in vain, that they would pay a bit more for it. No manuscript of the novel has been found, but it is estimated that the additions make up about 13 per cent of the total published by Harpers in July 1852. This published version has since been accepted as standard, and it served as copy text for the ...”

“... and therefore created a somewhat anxious series of opportunities for anti-Papists. It is more important, as Dr Dowling has already argued elsewhere, that Henry acquired a queen whose evangelical sympathies were far stronger than his occasional grudging acceptance of a community of interest. With Anne came the King’s doctor William Butts, ‘whose ...”

“... a dark continent of knowledge. He had originally intended – as far back as 1944 – to spend no more than three years in the field. It turned out to be thirty-three. After such an achievement, after such exertions, any ordinary human being might have felt that enough was enough, and faded into a well-deserved retirement, tending roses at home in ...”

“... revival of some magnitude. Religious explanations in history are all the rage – nowhere more so than in the study of the English Civil Wars. John Morrill, that panjandrum of Civil War revisionism, is reported to have advised a recent meeting of the Royal Historical Society to think of 1640-60 not as the first of Europe’s modern revolutions but as ...”

“... novelist. His new companions in the Abbey – Dickens, George Eliot and Hardy – may sell more copies of individual novels, but they cannot match the expansiveness of Trollope’s appeal. Forty or more of his works are currently in print – some in as many as five different editions. But for a century, Trollopians ...”

“... on their cars. The longships are called drakkars – for reasons no one seems to know, any more than they know where the wildly impractical horned helmet idea comes from – a word which has only some resemblance to genuine Old Norse dreki, ‘dragon’ or ‘dragon-ship’. Meanwhile, the aftershave Drakkar Noir trades on an aura of ...”

“... man could possibly have caused such a flutter, apart from his books’. Yet he did cause rather more than a flutter. Quite apart from his remarkable range of novels, poems, letters, plays, travel writings and literary/philosophical ‘pollyanalytics’, most by now the fodder for countless critical treatises, and even apart from his still oddly scandalous ...”

“... to the Republican governor of Missouri?’ Too often, the answer was yes, I had – sometimes more than once. My Sheena story was my best story, the anecdote that rarely failed, which was fortunate, because I couldn’t stop telling it, usually in the same way, even with the same pauses and hand gestures. At the end, I would play on my phone one of ...”

“... whispering in class, now they come to school with guns. Families? No one wants to get married any more, except the gays. Government? Never so bloated and corrupt. Our allies? Never so pusillanimous or venal. It’s quite a trick to seize power in every corner of American politics – as conservatives have in the past decade – only to announce loudly that ...”

“... could the abuse of power be subjected to any effective check? This question becomes the more obvious when the choice is between a behemoth and a monotreme, or as they are also respectively known, the US and the UN. The error, as others besides anarchists can see, lies in the thought that morality could be enforced by political power, and is the ...”