“... having done it in the past I knew that those stories would then end up being leaked’. Hugh Grant said it became clear to him and other people in the public eye in the mid-1990s that ‘if you had a burglary, or you got mugged or your car was broken into, you had to think really hard about whether you were going to call the police because the first ...”

“... live just long enough to hear reports that Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset, was being supplanted as James I’s latest most beloved delegate on earth by George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham. For a playwright working under such regimes, picturing ideal monarchs might be a far safer option than depicting the ways in which the affairs of state were really being ...”

“... or admire the virtue of his seriousness, their official complaints always finger his goodwill. James Wood recently wrote in the New Republic: The pomposity of [‘Oblivion’s’] narrator has disastrous results for the story. What might have been an affecting and genuinely ironic domestic tale, about a man’s comic-pathetic inability to read correctly ...”

“... encountered in the circumnavigation.The Royal Society would organise the astronomy, securing a grant from the king to pay for it; the navy would be responsible for the ship, commander, crew, stores and victualling. The vessel was the bark Endeavour; the commander was the bluff, 39-year-old Yorkshireman James Cook, who ...”

“... in 1838 – a Scottish naval captain had given the islanders the world’s first constitution to grant all men and all women the vote – is to see a handful of defenceless folk and their pigs wandering among the trees, and to hear the immensity of the Pacific breaking on the shore. But it’s not an empty immensity for Colley: ‘As regards constitutional ...”

“... during negotiations with Gorbachev over the reunification of Germany, the US secretary of state, James Baker, floated the idea of a pledge not to expand Nato eastwards. But the question of whether US and European leaders ‘promised’ there would be no eastward expansion is neither here nor there: Moscow was under no illusion about US intentions, and in any ...”

“... Oscar Wilde, Melville, Whitman, Poe, Hawthorne, Emerson, Dickinson, Benjamin Franklin, the King James Bible, Shakespeare and Erasmus, all within the first three paragraphs. Some appreciate Hardwick’s tacit assumption of her readers’ sophistication; the rest of us feel bamboozled.The​ essays in Seduction and Betrayal were written when Hardwick and ...”

“... United States’, who cultivated indifference to foreign conflicts, and who perversely refused to grant the president the autonomy he needed to conduct an effective foreign policy. Dallek doesn’t seem to realise that, after the failure of Wilson’s attempt to justify their personal sacrifice in taking part in the First World War, Americans might have ...”

“... a male, homosocial elite, owes much to the ethos and economy that grew up around the court of King James VI and I. By 1605-8, the likely date of Timon, the Scottish king had been on the English throne for several years, and a pattern had been established. He bought the loyalty of the nobility and the affection of handsome young men with jewels, gold vessels ...”

“... I took Donne’s greatness as axiomatic. I still enjoy much of Donne much of the time, but will grant more readily that Dryden and Johnson had a point: conspicuous cleverness is not always a good thing. It can go too far, and seem merely frivolous. There are moments, subjects and genres where it feels out of place. The usual advice – read a poet’s best ...”

“... to be himself throughout is the one person whom Woodward acknowledges at the outset did not grant an interview for the book: Trump. The president emerges as a bizarre and brutish character, but his behaviour has a strong streak of consistency. He cannot bear to be wrong and he will never admit defeat. He changes his mind but only because he forgets what ...”

“... the cover-up. In February 1973, after his re-election, Nixon fired Helms and replaced him with James Schlesinger. In an initiative to regain public trust as the crisis escalated, Schlesinger announced he was ‘determined that the law shall be respected’ and that anyone aware of illegal CIA activities was obliged to report them. Nixon was finally forced ...”

“... funding to Ark’s schools. In 2012, when his proposal to send a leatherbound copy of the King James Bible to every state school in the UK was nixed by David Cameron on grounds of cost, Marshall was among those who stepped in to foot the £370,000 bill. The following year, Gove appointed him lead non-executive director in the Department of ...”

“... Freud gave equal respect to the appeals of moralism and romanticism, but refused either to grant one of these priority over the other or to attempt a synthesis of them. He distinguished sharply between a private ethic of self-creation and a public ethic of mutual accommodation, and persuades us that there is no bridge between them provided by ...”

“... aid) slashed. Between 2010/11 and 2015/16, more than 50 per cent was cut from the central grant to local government; close to or more than 30 per cent from the budgets of the Department for Communities and Local Government, the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, the Department for Work and Pensions, the Ministry of Justice and the ...”