“... How can we know Samuel Johnson without summoning him through the reanimating power of James Boswell’s Life? For the many scholars, writers, readers and collectors who call themselves Johnsonians, this is the near impossible task. Boswell first met Johnson in 1763, in the back parlour of a bookshop. It belonged to a friend of Johnson, Thomas ...”

“... disappears behind them.’ Yet she had no self-confidence, none of the lordly conviction of Henry James or James Joyce; she awaited both reviews and the comments of her friends in a perfect pathos of fear and trembling, and each new attempt at a book was wholly tentative and unsure. Her ideas were all in the form of an ...”

“... But the double story of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes is material for an Emily Brontë or a Henry James, a great ghost story with the roles of haunter and haunted, villain and victim, hopelessly entwined. This Gothic tale, Rose demonstrates, ‘seems to have the power to draw everybody who approaches it into its orbit, to make you feel that somehow you ...”

“... best that can be said on behalf of Mr Derek Pattinson, the Secretary-General of the Synod, and Mr James Shelley, the Secretary to the Church Commissioners, who passed Dr Bennett’s essay for publication, is that they may have been lulled into a sense of false security by the nature of the notably anodyne Preface contributed by Dr David Edwards, the present ...”

“... is in incessant trivial flippancy,’ says Victor, sounding like one of Coward’s critics. Like James Agate, for instance, who wrote in the Sunday Times: ‘Mr Coward is credited with the capacity of turning out these highly-polished pieces of writing in an incredibly short time, and if rumour and the illustrated weeklies are to be believed, he writes his ...”

“... a good time – and good times are what she chiefly writes about. After a supper at Petworth where Harold Macmillan had been present, she told Waugh that ‘except for a weakness for anecdotes about the peerage, everything he said was interesting,’ but added: ‘I doubt if he would enjoy a jolly jokes evening.’ That, to the extent that it’s fair to judge ...”

“... in Northern Ireland in April 1974. By 1976, the back of the Labour Government had been broken. Harold Wilson resigned, and begged his successor, James Callaghan, to carry out a full-scale investigation into what he felt had been the subversion of his office by the security services. Callaghan refused. Although Wilson ...”

“... by those who don’t care to go into a question very deeply. The report had been commissioned by Harold Wilson in 1969, to head off the Scottish nationalists. At the time, Edward Heath was already proposing a Scottish Assembly, but the arrival of Margaret Thatcher on the scene decisively quenched the feeble flicker of devolutionary spirit in the Tory ...”

“... Rewards and Fairies, the old madman brought before King William by Rahere the Jester revealed as Harold Godwin, and Hugh, the Saxon knight, kneeling to him. And ‘each time,’ writes Inglis, ‘the queer, crisp ripple of excitement tingled along my spine; the brimming tears which never quite fell, the chokey lump in the throat ... You see the same in ...”

“... The Social Animal, explains that his fictional everywoman ‘Erica’ is slow to trust ‘Harold’ because ‘while Pleistocene men could pick their mates on the basis of fertility cues discernible at a glance, Pleistocene women faced a more vexing problem,’ since they had to choose a man ‘not only for insemination but for continued ...”

“... it was a milch cow allowing him to function as a political grandee. He hung on to his shares when Harold Macmillan brought him into the Cabinet in 1962 – responsible for house-building at that – in a way that would not survive scrutiny by today’s less relaxed standards. The images of Joseph from that era are not easily reconciled with that of the Mad ...”

“... W. is not dumb – narrow yes, facile certainly, but not dumb. Nor are his managers: to watch James Baker, Secretary of State under George I, work the courts and manipulate the media in Florida is to witness a pro at work. And Dick Cheney is the very definition of a veteran operative. Nevertheless, high on his resumé is the fact that Bush gave up ...”

“... younger group of postmodern artists who substituted photographic imagery for painting, among them James Coleman, Louise Lawler and Cindy Sherman. ‘Door to the River’ (1960) In Art since 1900, the massive textbook she and her October colleagues published in 2005, de Kooning seems to be one of a passel of painters in whose hands ‘the entire ...”

“... proud (I’m thinking of Edmund White’s complaints about ‘blue-chip gays’ like Sontag and Harold Brodkey; with Vidal, he had a whole other slate of indictments). The future may look upon the closet-clingers more benignly, or at least more apathetically, as the labels of sexual identity peel away like old bumper stickers and we evolve into a ...”

“... word being closely attended to, even feared, by ministers and by the public. And it was feared. Harold Wilson’s 1964-70 and 1974-76 Governments and James Callaghan’s 1976-79 Administration spent more time cajoling, ‘standing up to’, browbeating, placating and schmoozing with union leaders than with any other ...”