“... Derby hat (a sartorial touch borrowed, no doubt, from the American Presidential candidate, Al Smith), his jaunty, athletic air (he was forever vaulting over fences) and his marvellous gift for mimicry (enabling him mercilessly to take off his opponents) he was a born showman of the hustings. The local Tories called him ‘a champagne Charlie, all froth ...”

“... appear almost artistic. Intentionally or not, sculptors who worked in welded steel, such as David Smith and Anthony Caro, rendered industrial production aesthetic, while others like John Chamberlain and Arman artified its debris: some of the trashed cars and smashed commodities at Hangar 17 recall the work of the latter ...”

“... gambit paid off. Trump filled Scalia’s seat with Justice Neil Gorsuch. Soon after, Justice Anthony Kennedy retired. At 81, Kennedy was older than a Supreme Court judge should be; but he wasn’t ill (and is still alive). Nevertheless, he decided that President Trump and the Republican Senate were the ones he wanted to nominate and confirm his ...”

“... in gold and what in the long run would prove to be infinitely more valuable, silver. As Adam Smith wryly remarked, for the first time in human history, Fortune had granted her devotees ‘something not very unlike that profusion of precious metals’ they had spent centuries looking for. ‘One might call oneself emperor of this kingdom,’ Cortés ...”

“... sixth floor of a Jeddah apartment block in May 1979. There were no other women, except for Helen Smith, a 23-year-old nurse from Yorkshire who worked in the same private hospital as Richard Arnot, a surgeon. What actually occurred at the party is still the subject of dispute, and is related to a pending legal action. But everyone knows what happened ...”

“... quantities of what they had originally gone there to find: precious metals. ‘Fortune,’ Adam Smith remarked dryly, ‘did upon this what she has done upon very few other occasions. She realised in some measure the extravagant hope of her votaries.’ The British (and the French), who had gone with the same extravagant hope, had come home ...”

“... of what’s past, present, or to come: insensible of mortality, and desperately mortal’. David Smith finds most of this description eminently applicable to H.G. Wells (whom he intensely admires) and he adopts its final two words as a subtitle for his biography. What sense Shakespeare attached to them is doubtful. Johnson suggests ‘likely to die in a ...”

“... Anthony Sampson begins and ends his book with an account of his grandfather’s funeral, held, as requested in his will, at the top of a Welsh mountain, Foel Goch. Among the mourners were Gypsy harpers and fiddlers, scholars, civic officials and ‘the painter Mr Augustus John’. ‘Hundreds of spectators,’ it was reported, ‘waited for the coming of the mortal remains of Dr John Sampson, the well-known philologist and librarian of Liverpool University ...”

“... the reality was another matter. He knew that his real home had been the condemned playground. Anthony Powell comments on the odd fact that Connolly’s chosen and not uncherished home in later years was not some castle in Spain or a Dordogne farmhouse but a bald redbrick villa in an Eastbourne street, well away from the sea but not so far from his ...”

“... has no doubt at all. ‘They were the best.’ Hugh Gaitskell, Iain Macleod, Richard Titmuss, Anthony Crosland and Edward Boyle. They were all ‘clever, honest, admirable and honourable’. They were all, except Boyle, who was at school at the time, affected by the slump. They were all excited by the political changes and administrative advances of the ...”

“... for instance, is both meticulous and plausible. The same can hardly be said of Martin Seymour-Smith in his new critical biography of Kipling. In addition to being one of the most lopsided lives ever written – 23 chapters on the first forty years, only two chapters on the last thirty – this is also one of the most incorrigible in its ...”

“... of Douglas-Home, and in 1957 instead of Macmillan; he has even said that he felt he, rather than Anthony Eden, should have followed Churchill as prime minister. Butler had little regard for Eden, of whom he said, ‘he is the best prime minister we have got,’ adding when asked to amplify the remark: ‘Oh, capax imperii and all that.’ In other ...”

“... American academics – all become the occasions of poems. The suicide attempt, on vacation from Smith College in the summer of 1953, is crucial. It seems likely that the ECT treatment that followed it, as an attempted ‘cure’, affected her for the rest of her life. In most circumstances, evidently, she could carry on in her ...”

“... Thrice has Anthony Burgess begun a novel in bed, with intimations of impropriety and guilt. Getting out of the dreadful thing was the problem posed for the bold bigamist of Beds in the East, the third volume in his Malayan trilogy: ‘Either side of the bed was the wrong side. True it was possible to get out of it by inching slowly forward, on one’s fat brown rump, to the foot; but that, for some reason, often woke both of them ...”

“... litigator once told me that his strategy was to ‘shut Antonin Scalia up long enough to get Anthony Kennedy on my side’.)The composition of the Supreme Court determines the path of the country. It is therefore unsurprising that appointments to the court are politically contentious. (The Trump administration displayed a rare competence in the ruthless ...”