“... admiration of his achievement and to distil his improvised responses to the problems of his own day as timeless watchwords of wisdom. Defiance, which served the British well enough in 1940, subsequently became a mantra for a nation in denial about its reduced place in the world, with, as time passed, increasingly bizarre acts of atavistic self-assertion to ...”

“... it was entirely her own fault. At which point the Treasury (Major, Lamont) and the Foreign Office (Douglas Hurd) realised that Thatcher was so weak, and so desperate to avoid yet more interest rate increases, that if they wanted to push her into the ERM, now was the time to do it. In this spirit she was told that a judicious series of leaks suggesting that ...”

“... How sane, how wise!’ I am the mirror where your image moves, Neat and obedient twin, until one day It moves before you move; and it is you Who have to ape its moods and motions, who Must now obey. That’s Tessimond’s take on the popular press, and like his poems on advertising and money and the silver screen and the various types who feature in his ...”

“... place where, when you have to go there,/They have to take you in’, and which she will one day inherit, is tall, awkward, gloomy, cluttered with memories, and stuffed with heavy Victorian furniture. The only children occasionally to be found playing there are Ames’s son Robert and his friend Tobias. Glory’s consciousness permeates Home, which is ...”

“... from each of Shakespeare’s plays. This is Stratford-upon-Avon on the weekend after 23 April, a day celebrated since the 18th century as Shakespeare’s Birthday. As Park Honan’s impressive new biography reminds us, the parish records for 1564 make it certain only that he was christened on 26 April, and our knowledge of contemporary church practice ...”

“... Sue said, ‘and died the kind of death you would not wish on a rabid dog.’ On his last day, Bob asked her if everything was ‘sorted’ financially: ‘I lied and told him we’d be fine, and a few minutes later he died.’ Sue couldn’t face going to the place where his ashes were scattered: she told Caroline Wheeler that she never would ...”

“... Seventies and Eighties half-obliterating surviving brick-clad structures that were giants in their day, and spelling out the fiercely Darwinian message of this boom city. Then they are behind you, and you get a confused hint of the rest of the place, which looks to a British eye like an endlessly extended suburb. Houston is now the fourth largest city in the ...”

“... enormous faith in Boeing’s future prospects. The shares of its nearest equivalent, McDonnell Douglas, were by contrast selling at only 15 times earnings, while the price-earnings ratio for General Electric, that great battleship of corporate America, was only 19. In that same week, a survey of members of the International Association of Machinists and ...”

“... that are essential to the bohemian ethos, as, too, is tedium, though of a peculiar sort. ‘Day after uneventful day,’ Quentin Crisp remembered, writing about Soho in the late 1920s, ‘night after loveless night, we sat in this café buying each other cups of tea, combing each other’s hair and trying on each ...”

“... how tenaciously Americans remember’ – or more to the point misremember – ‘that day of infamy’. Three months later, 9/11 gave us a Pearl Harbor redux far worse than Dower could have imagined. That politicians should draw an analogy between a surprise attack by four hijacked planes manned by 20 terrorists belonging to a non-state ...”

“... the philosophical works, had to drop out because of illness, and the role of his other colleague, Douglas Denon Heath, was limited to editing the legal works. The result ranks among the greatest works of Victorian scholarship. Thomas Carlyle called it ‘the hugest and faithfullest bit of literary navvy work I have ever met with in this ...”

“... and going into the subject a certain amount. Some in the press had shown they were ready to do so: Douglas Warth, in the Sunday Pictorial, warned that ‘the natural British tendency to pass over anything unpleasant in scornful silence’ was providing cover for an ‘unnatural sex vice which is getting a dangerous grip in this country … The silence, I ...”

“... among the orange groves and onion fields north of Los Angeles. We do catch the odd glimpse of Douglas Fairbanks or Charlie Chaplin off-duty, and we learn that, ‘contrary to dark rumour’, Fairbanks wears his own teeth: but what Vidal has to offer might have been more accurately if less enticingly labelled Woodrow Wilson and Warren Harding. Hollywood ...”

“... Her routine did not vary: at the revolving rack outside the big Rexall she would pause each day to inspect the unchanging selection of postcards. Three blocks further she would stop at the harbour, sit on the low wall above the docks and watch the loading or unloading of one or another inter-island freighter. After the Rexall and the harbour she ...”

“... remotely disconcerts, let alone disturbs. It is instructive to compare it with those films of Douglas Sirk – All that Heaven Allows, Imitation of Life, A Time to Love and a Time to Die etc – that are, apparently, soapy weepies but contain within, because of their rigid adherence to genre conventions, descriptions of the way human beings are cut up to ...”