“... not expect good marriages or genteel occupations. Matilda disappears from the records while Eliza took care of her grandmother in her old age, dying herself at 30. The ‘moonlight shades’ and their mother stand for the women, black and brown, whose near invisibility, yet absolute centrality to the system of slavery, speak to the silences of the archive and ...”

“... church (four services a day, six on Sundays), part tourist attraction, since the 1590s – when John Donne, not yet dean of St Paul’s, recorded that one of the vergers was charging visitors to see the royal tombs. The crucial events were the Reformation, when it lost its monks and lands and found its finances insecure, and Elizabeth I’s subsequent ...”

“... were a mistake. (Didn’t he have one kind friend who could have whispered something tactful?) As John Updike has put it in a very thoughtful fashion commentary on the whole unfortunate business: Ike, for instance, dear Ike with his infallible instincts, would never have let himself be caught in lace stockings, even though he did have the legs for them. I ...”

“... lighting oil to meet the demand that the increasingly expensive extract from whales could not. He took the advice of a chemist at Yale, who needed the fee and was accordingly enthusiastic, and had a second bright idea, which was that the oil, already being dug up in parts of Eastern Europe and China and there being turned into kerosene, could be got in larger ...”

“... Denis: ‘Marnie – wig, smell and all’; ‘Sam Smith, MP for Flint and religious bore’; ‘John Bulman, tutor, whisky lover and cheat’; ‘The misery of picnics’; ‘The Palship, dressed to kill ... ’ In triumphant contrast, there is: ‘Myself at 11, fisherman, child musicologist and budding atheist’. A Welsh Childhood is also strengthened by ...”

“... it. Back in his office, which had no natural light, he often napped much of the afternoon. Then he took home his files and worked and drank through the night. Although this was in that long-forgotten time when heavy drinking was not a medical sin, Angleton’s consumption of alcohol must have been a problem. He drank between 150 and 200 units a week, a unit ...”

“... painters to be Epstein’s advocates. His commercial success depended on a few patrons, above all John Quinn, who bought much of his early carving, and on the demand for portraiture from a group very much more nearly coterminous with the political establishment than his detractors were. Epstein found the attitudes of critics understandable: they were a ...”

“... this sickly interlude U and I was a return to form. The book explored Baker’s relationship with John Updike, as writerly model, father figure to be challenged, and occasional sharer of the same physical space (the two men’s passing encounters couldn’t be said to constitute even acquaintance). U and I reduced Updike’s work to a mulch of remembered ...”

“... nearly ten years after the first meeting, that the relationship between Janácek and Stösslová took a decisive turn in the course of a brief visit by Janácek to the couple’s home in Pisek. Janácek’s letters suggest that he was not an unsensual man – even when the relationship was officially just friendship, Stösslová sometimes sounds like ...”

“... two decades could be summed up in a single title, it would surely be ‘Lost in the Funhouse’. John Barth’s short story, published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1967, was a composite text in which an account of a family’s visit to a fairground was spliced in with what appeared to be a set of instructions from a fiction-writer’s manual. The funhouse (in ...”

“... model to which thinking on these issues would try to conform. The model is that provided by John Stuart Mill’s essay On Liberty, and the doctrine that it endorses runs something like this: some people like obscenity, and some don’t, and those who don’t tend to find it filthy, horrible, revolting, and, probably, immoral. But even if obscenity is ...”

“... the hands and clothes – are more distinctly Lavaterian in inspiration. (Barbara Hardy and John Carey have illuminatingly anatomised the significance of clothes as an index of character in Dickens and Thackeray, without invoking physiognomy.) But the truth is that after the effective build-up in the background chapters which comprise half of his ...”

“... and arrived at Oxford in 1853 a fervent Tractarian: he dreamed of following in the footsteps of John Henry Newman or even joining a monastic brotherhood. The spiritual intensity of his Oxford phase and the dream of brotherhood never left him, but the appeal of the church gradually faded; by the time he set out for London three years later, the disciple of ...”

“... of its best and brightest – Robin Cook, Douglas Alexander, Alistair Darling, Gordon Brown, even John Smith – had stayed in Scotland to lead the party and the devolved government at Holyrood? Only Donald Dewar took the train back north and became first minister of Scotland in 1999. It would be good to think that ...”

“... power except France. Only from close up can we see how perilous and uncertain many of the steps he took appeared at the time. As Jonathan Steinberg shows in this superb biography, there was nothing preordained about Bismarck’s successes. Had the war with Denmark not revived his fortunes he might well have disappeared from Prussian and German politics for ...”