“... manufacturer, E. Remington and Sons. And the Tommy gun, invented by a one-time Remington engineer, John Taliaferro Thompson, was known during prohibition as the ‘Chicago typewriter’. The emphasis on typewriting as rugged individualism (not so much Wershler-Henry’s as that of the tough guys he writes about) is presumably not unconnected to an anxiety that ...”

“... experience of terror’ to put the government’s case, such as the Glasgow ‘folk hero’ John Smeaton, who wrestled a burning suicide bomber to the ground (nobody got round to asking Smeaton if he had a view on the matter). But what’s really farcical about the situation isn’t that Davis is about to fight a one-man crusade against himself. The ...”

“... of the recordings take the form of interviews, and the presenters don’t make matters any easier; John Lehmann, for example, speaks to Aldous Huxley as if he were questioning him with a view to offering him something at the Foreign Office. Which just goes to show that broadcasting vices existed long before the days of Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross. None of ...”

“... It’s the dignity at Appomattox of Robert E. Lee Live from Phoenix on TV. That old white warrior John McCain gracefully concedes. Nobly gives the nation what it needs. A thousand years from now, you know it, This day will be remembered, poet. By the shores of Gitche Gumee, By the shining Big-Sea-Water, Told his message to the people, Told the purport of his ...”

“... ever since it was exhibited in 1971. Mel Gooding, in his monograph on Ayres, records the gallerist John Kasmin asking her: ‘What am I meant to do with them?’ ‘You’re a dealer: I’m a painter. I must get on with what I want to do.’ The tone of that is typical. One-foot-out-the-door-ness flavours the whole Ayres operation and has, despite Kasmin’s ...”

“... thighs and remarkably elastic anatomy, than among portraits or specimens of natural history (the John Dory, a monkey, a dromedary).Having established the distinction between Olympian poetry and quotidian prose, he obtained startling effects by allowing elements of one mode to cross into another: he gave his antique heroes the huge moustaches of contemporary ...”

“... had passed as a subject ‘out of the orbit of landscape into that of Victorian genre’, as John Gage says in his book about Turner’s picture. The Railway Station shows a train about to leave Paddington; the detail of the architecture is correct – Frith had photographs taken for reference – but it is the partings and greetings you look at ...”

“... only other member of the coven who had any English was a dwarf with gold teeth’). The producer, John Houseman, made up a past as a cowboy and Cambridge graduate. The critic who flattered the production’s reputation for jinxes by dropping dead after filing a disobliging review had been ill for ages; his main complaint was that the curtain went up late.The ...”

“... to thunder – is a hot line to the person who created Bertha Mason. Yet a few feet away is Gwen John’s Girl in a Red Shawl, in creams and rusts, with no harsh lines but very exact hair, looking like a mural in the process of being uncovered. Without a linking narrative it is not easy to decide what might bring the paintings by ...”

“... without him. And surely, this is something; surely this is enough.’ The statement is quoted by John Morrill in his introduction to the volume of essays he has edited, Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution, a book, as he says, about ‘another man who rose from humble East Anglian roots to dominate his world’. Whether a substantial professional ...”

“... friend’s leaves were swamping, Clasps cracking, and covers suppling! As if you had carried sour John Knox To the play at Paris, Vienna, or Munich, Fastened him into a front-row box, And danced off the Ballet in trowsers and tunic. Come, old martyr! What, torment enough is it? Back to my room shall you take your sweet self! Good ...”

“... such as Michael Portillo and Peter Lilley and a strange breed of suburban Brylcreem boys – John Moore, Kenneth Baker, Jeffrey Archer and, pre-eminently, Cecil Parkinson. What they have in common is a dreadful smarminess, a smoothly blatant insincerity which apparently nothing can puncture – Baker’s own recent memoirs are one long purr of bland ...”

“... unit, set square to the prevailing on-shore winds. The occupier, New York-born to a childhood in John Cheever commuting country, now reinvented as a Vietnam-vintage Irish citizen, removes all the offending oil paintings from the wall: jewelled landscapes in oil; lively, naive renderings of the headland on which the cottages have been built. Expressionist ...”

“... well before Wright. Homosexual smears were directed against Edward Heath, Jeremy Thorpe, Norman St John Stevas and Humphrey Berkeley; bogus bank accounts (showing corrupt earnings) were contrived for Edward Short and Ian Paisley; Wilson was seen as the beneficiary of, and a possible participant in, the assassination of Hugh Gaitskell; lists were drawn up of ...”

“... Of those that remain, Joshua Reynolds, the Shakespearian scholar Malone and the politician John Courtenay are affectionate and supportive. These were the years, as we occasionally have to remind ourselves, when his Life of Johnson was completed, put to press, published, relished and extolled. This does less for him than might have been ...”