“... the account of it is inaccurate in almost every detail (old men forget), he warned me that Cecil King, because I declined to do something he asked of me, would make sure I’d never find another job in London. In fact, as I rightly supposed, Mr King, if ever he had any such intention, which is very doubtful, simply had not ...”

“... and lawyers in support of Henry Wallace’s 1948 Presidential campaign. And in My life as a Man, Peter Tarnopol’s brother Moe offers his children edifying bedside stories: ‘Instead of Pinocchio, Joe McCarthy; instead of Uncle Remus, tales of Paul Robeson and Martin Luther King.’ Even Alexander Portnoy is a trusted ...”

“... as one of the first volumes of the complete works of George Orwell, for which the editor, Dr Peter Davison, uses Orwell’s original manuscripts, letters and proofs to establish the text that Orwell would have wished to have. In the case of this work, among the most personal and directly political of Orwell’s writings, he has made particular use of the ...”

“... governments have tried to subdue the Corporation. Mrs Thatcher’s man was said to have been Lord King, privatiser of British Airways, and a highly unsuitable choice that would have been. We have been spared Lord King, who has withdrawn, and rumour has had it that we may be given Lord Barnett instead, someone with no ...”

“... it officially was) practised religious toleration. When Henri duc d’Anjou was elected king in January 1573, only months after tens of thousands of Protestants had been massacred in his native France, he was forced to submit to a resolution which ran: Since there is in our Commonwealth no little disagreement on the subject of religion, in order to ...”

“... the Portuguese colonial governor; it was sent along with a chest-full of precious baubles to the king of Portugal. As with many gifts, there was a diffuse expectation of reciprocity – in this case, the hope that the gesture might forestall a disastrous war with the European power. The rhino was loaded in chains onto a Portuguese ship in Goa and delivered ...”

“... tells much the same story as that given by Elisabeth Murray (Caught in the Web of Words, 1977) and Peter Sutcliffe (in his 1978 ‘informal history’ of OUP), from their biographical and house-historical perspectives. Willinsky’s Murray, however, is less the innocent gnome in his funny hat in the scriptorium at the bottom of the garden in the Banbury ...”

“... knowledge ‘not worth a button’. In Philadelphia, William Cobbett, under the pseudonym Peter Porcupine, launched biting satires on the eminent exile’s garbled style and dangerous beliefs. In London, Johnson was long convinced of Priestley’s badness: ‘an evil man, sir, his work unsettles everything yet settles nothing’. Boswell helpfully ...”

“... not appeal to those who find twists in the tail meretricious and prefer the sort which not only peter out but peter in. Yet it is impossible not to admire the craftsmanship, the precision, the unerring selection of the right asp from the basket to do the lethal job. As Self says, ‘Arresting metaphor follows terse ...”

“... in these pains … as one who has found great treasures.’ After her breasts are cut off, St Peter heals them (over her protests) so that she can survive to face new torments. A kind of double vision is required of the spectator: where pagan kings and their minions see only unbearable pain, martyrs experience the invisible power of God. Their legends ...”

“... organisation, possibly founded by Churchill during World War Two? What did Deza’s mentor, Sir Peter Wheeler (modelled on the Oxford professor Sir Peter Russell), do during the Spanish Civil War? And what about the bloodstain on his stairs? What is being set up by the narrator’s constant outing of ‘bogus ...”

“... of these Russian billionaires had wined and dined European and American leaders and officials. Peter Mandelson, then the EU trade commissioner, and George Osborne, the future chancellor, spent some time on the aluminium mogul Oleg Deripaska’s yacht Queen K off the coast of Corfu in 2008. Queen K, later renamed Clio and now renamed Altair, was in the ...”

“... not a two-volume Bible but a single-leaf, 31-line indulgence, printed on vellum by Gutenberg and Peter Schoeffer in 1454, and issued at Erfurt. It is a slight, narrow printed strip with blank spaces left for the date, name and town, which would be added by hand before the indulgence was shown to a confessor to secure forgiveness. The real purpose of the ...”

“... of that, and the Express in particular is down on its luck. In the days of Hugh Cudlipp and Cecil King, the Mirror was a wonder to us all – slick, successful and serious about its politics. Its journalists and layout men buzzed round Hugh Gaitskell, seeking to burnish the Labour Party’s shabby image. Now, in 1987, Captain Maxwell does his best when not ...”

“... their language, distorted how they looked at the world and at themselves. Yet, as both Judd and Peter Marshall demonstrate, neither Parliament nor the public ever gave Empire much conscious and sustained attention except when things were going hideously wrong and/or when they themselves were directly involved. Thus there were English colonies in America ...”