“... to give the audience a new idea. It is easiest to make such changes when the playwright is dead. John Osborne and Peter Nichols did not want Miller to alter their plays, but he was more fortunate when he directed Robert Lowell’s version of Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound. Since Miller did not want to set this play in the Caucasus, with an actor tied to a ...”

“... the worst uprooting of Rhodesia’s black peasantry (as well as the run-up to Mau Mau in Kenya) took place under another noted Fabian Colonial Secretary, Arthur Creech Jones. Ranger is at pains to insist that Zimbabwe’s road to independence has been neither a carbon copy of Kenyan capitalism nor, as John Saul and Basil ...”

“... worse, it did not warn him to stay out of Switzerland until it was too late. Yet the Department took infinite care to keep its own officials out of the country during the course of their investigations. As a final insult, the EEC forced Adams to accept £20,000 as compensation – which was less than one-fifth of the enormous debts he had ...”

“... at the end of the war, the chief rabbi of Rome, Israel Zolli, converted to Catholicism and took the baptismal name Eugenio, in gratitude, he explained, for the pope’s efforts on behalf of the Jews during the war. When Pacelli died in 1958 there was an outpouring of admiration: the Israeli foreign minister, Golda Meir, praised Pius as one who, in ...”

“... such books as Lucky Jim, Hurry on Down and even Room at the Top’ – novels by Kingsley Amis, John Wain and John Braine, which appeared in 1954, 1953 and 1957 respectively. But Bradbury also tells us – he is writing in 1962 – that he finds this positioning ‘rather curious’, chiefly because of ‘the curious ...”

“... with titles like ‘The Nameless Little Flower’ or ‘The Dream of the White Cloud’. Like John Clare, he found his poems in the fields and wrote them down. ‘I heard a mysterious sound in nature,’ he later said. ‘That sound became poetry in my life.’ He wrote that his ‘earliest experience of the nature of poetry’ was a raindrop. His ...”

“... public scandal is infinite.’ ‘By the common consent of all London’, Byron’s close friend John Cam Hobhouse said, Caroline had ‘made a dead set at him’. By the middle of May, Byron realised that he had been reckless; their affair had got out of hand. Besides, he hated scenes, and she could not live without them. In an affectionate letter he told ...”

“... the chief executive of Madison’s republic enjoys a power of suspending legislation which it took a civil war in this country to wrest from the crown. The parallel anomaly of the lord chancellor’s triple role was offset by the value of a minister who by convention was not a career politician and whose rank in cabinet enabled him to resist political ...”

“... facts about Burgess that are known and that matter to his writing. He was baptised a Catholic as John Burgess Wilson in Manchester in 1917, the offspring of a mother who did something on the stage and a father who did something with pianos and perhaps rather more with cigarettes. After his mother and sister died of the flu in 1918 he was brought up by a ...”

“... could they have committed themselves to serial publication in the nerve-stretching form it then took.In his contract for Drood Dickens for the first time had a clause inserted providing for arbitration on how much of the up-front money (£7,500 to cover the first 25,000 copies) should be repaid ‘if the said Charles Dickens shall die’ or be otherwise ...”

“... Montaigne. To the bonfire with William Hazlitt, closely followed by Max Beerbohm, Sainte-Beuve and John Aubrey. A brusque kiss-off to Francis Bacon, Charles Lamb, La Bruyère and the best of Mencken, not to mention Svetonius’s Lives of the Caesars; and into the garbage goes Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, perhaps the finest book of profile-essays ever ...”

“... careless, though – his wound could probably have been avoided), and at home during the war he took charge of his section in the Home Guard, drilling the awkward squad, which included Fred Warburg, with great seriousness, and teaching them to make bombs out of milk bottles. He saw in the Home Guard the makings of a revolutionary militia, his view no doubt ...”

“... he warned. ‘The wave of population will break upon that shore, and roll back upon itself.’ John Maynard Keynes, who made no secret of his admiration for Malthus, attributed the First World War and the Russian Revolution to overpopulation and global competition for food. The ‘great acceleration’ of the second half of the 20th century, a period of ...”

“... but even more so because its sensational image may encourage false, 20th-century expectations. But John Burrow will not mind. He writes to burst joy’s bubble upon the tongue. A Liberal Descent, like the works of 19th-century historical scholarship that it discusses, is written out of a tradition that respects personality (which is not at all the same thing ...”

“... bookish’ (he alludes more than once to his days as a university lecturer in English), took the form of his book less from the river than from other books. His model was the quest-romance, especially in its Renaissance versions, but he borrowed elements from heroic legends of all ages. ‘A journey which had all the essential features of a ...”