“... Mastership of Trinity, practised critical scholarship in his commentary on Marcus Aurelius, and John Pearson, an eminent theologian, who was successively Master of Jesus, Master of Trinity and Bishop of Chester, displayed it in brilliant emendations of the text of Aeschylus. In 1662 Richard Bentley, one of the greatest critical scholars, was born near ...”

“... VII and Prince Charles may be added the names of every long-suffering heir since the Hanoverians took over: George II, George IV and Edward VIII, not forgetting poor Prince Frederick, the son of George II and father of George III, who did not survive to reign at all. Whatever their differences of character and temperament, all of them had to confront the ...”

“... done when the Sun was new and its light faint: too faint to keep water from freezing. No wonder it took 3.5 billion years to get as far as blundering bipeds with sharp stones in their hands.This story – pieced together only in the later years of this century, to a large extent in the wake of planetary exploration – was part of the mythology of the ‘blue ...”

“... by his translation of the Austrian folk tale Bambi, which carried a moist Foreword from John Galsworthy.) This was the literary bridge that carried Chambers from relative hackdom on the Daily Worker to pre-eminence at the Stalinist flagship of letters, The New Masses. Indeed it was his usefulness and ability in this department that got him ...”

“... In so far as there was a shared response to Hart Crane’s poetry after his suicide in 1932, it took the form of invidious comparisons. ‘Crane had the sensibility typical of Baudelaire,’ R.P. Blackmur wrote in 1935, ‘and so misunderstood himself that he attempted to write The Bridge as if he had the sensibility typical of Whitman ...”

“... and a piping bullfinch. Masters tells us that one of her husband’s pets, an Amazon parrot, took a personal dislike to her. It wasn’t much of a life – despised by a parrot, kept sitting in the dark each evening while the animals slept, and married in name only – but better things were in store for Lois, who left London in 1940 to take up a post as ...”

“... They served at the pleasure of their sovereigns and not a minute longer. After all, it only took the young Kaiser Wilhelm II a stroke of the pen to dismiss the great Bismarck who had served his grandfather for 26 years. Hersh is right to say that Kissinger understood the terms of his employment: ‘Henry Kissinger entered the White House on Inauguration ...”

“... consciousness of children makes them peculiarly susceptible to physical humiliation. Juniors took baths, one every three days, in a scruffy little room, four baths standing like islands on its stained red lino floor. We were washed and dried with detached vigour and once a fortnight our hair was washed with a harsh-smelling medicated shampoo, and our ...”

“... go wrong and absorb more forces ... quote a strong body wanted just to leave it on one side. But John Fieldhouse and I were quite keen to have a go because we thought we could do it and also felt we needed a success. We hadn’t many successes politically. We also needed a success militarily to get Ministers to believe in what are could do because a lot of ...”

“... flesh as passing shadows. Hardly was Budé told of Erasmus’s sense of outrage before he, too, took offence. Erasmus’s heart must have given a lurch when he saw the address on the letter: ‘From Guillaume Budé, his erstwhile friend, to Erasmus, with best wishes – and never again’. And it goes on in the same tone: ‘your ill-tempered ...”

“... political vocabularies have been emptied of any possible meaning, these conjectures often took the form of jokes. One which appeared as a strip-cartoon in the pages of La Codorniz, a semi-clandestine Spanish version of Le Canard Enchaîné, went as follows: the young prince Felipe asks the king, whether there will be a public holiday when Franco ...”

“... as a soldier were seen at their best at the Battle of the Bulge, when the German offensive which took everyone by surprise was expertly contained. The Allies crossed the Rhine in good order, but there was trouble again over the invasion of Germany. Eisenhower, by now barely on speaking terms with Montgomery, decided not to try to get first to Berlin, an ...”

“... fame by standing outside singing a hymn while the major was engaged within; the latter afterwards took his boot to the missionary in no uncertain fashion. The Bombay Guardian found the fracas excellent copy. Missionary zeal also led Moss to acquire a tricycle as a means of chasing after ‘the carriages of some of the aristocratic official frequenters of the ...”

“... Election by Ronald Reagan, Carter had an understandable yearning to be taken seriously, and Abedi took him very seriously indeed. The holy banker flew round and round the world with the exPresident so that both men could declare their shared faith in the importance of Third World development – and conduct a bit of business on the side. When the Carter ...”

“... so interested in South American fiction as they have since become, and few indeed were those who took an interest in South American politics – apart perhaps from worrying about the imperious interventions of North Americans, so eager to counter the threat of Communism in their hemisphere. Huneeus stimulated an interest in such matters which persisted in ...”