“... anything that can be done,’ he would say. I have a multitude of notes from Mr Silvers (it took me years to stop calling him that) but I find they are not in the filing cabinet with all the other letters and notes; they are in the books on my shelves. He had a knack of making you feel that the thing that might be done could only be done by you. ‘You ...”

“... begins with a comparison of the careers of William Godwin, the philosopher and novelist, and John Thelwall, the leading orator of the popular reform movement and author of The Peripatetic, one of the very best, most unread and most unclassifiable works of the 18th century: part novel, part travel journal, part satire, part commentary on the state of the ...”

“... to Dorothy was not merely rhetorical – that she was truly there to hear the lines as they took shape, were tested and amended. Barker records Ralph Waldo Emerson, on a visit in 1833, being told by Wordsworth that he was used to holding hundreds of lines of his poetry in his head before they were ever transcribed. She does not use one nice detail of ...”

“... Parmigianino on a half-globe of wood is the first impression which many people take away from John Ashbery’s poetry. The poem in which it appears, ‘Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror’, a meditation on Parmigianino’s strange Mannerist painting, suddenly made Ashbery’s name much less obscure than his work. The collection to which it lent its name ...”

“... congregation were in tears.’ When he had become a celebrity, men as notoriously irreligious as John Wilkes and David Hume attended church services to hear him preach. ‘Tristram pleads his cause well, tho’ he does not believe one word of it,’ Wilkes noted with satisfaction. Reading his sermons, Thomas Gray thought that they showed ‘a sensible ...”

“... Bill, where he studied English and edited the Daily Bruin (Watergate conspirators Bob Haldeman and John Ehrlichman were his arch-enemies on the paper). By then, he’d already been part of the Allied occupation of Germany pulling bodies out of the rubble, gone AWOL to attend the Nuremberg Trials (with the intention of assassinating Hermann Göring) and worked ...”

“... 1611 spelling, ornamental capitals beginning each chapter, a detailed map of Palestine engraved by John Speed (whose maps of English counties were selling so well at the time), a calendar of Church of England holy days and lessons for church services, and, strangest of all, 34 meticulously referenced genealogical tables of biblical characters culminating in ...”

“... his apprenticeship without mishap in 1761. By 1767 he was in partnership with another bookseller, John Payne, in premises in Paternoster-row by St Paul’s Churchyard, ‘the centre of bookselling’, and he was to settle in the capital for the rest of his life. The profession of bookseller was at that time a capacious one. Johnson not only sold books but ...”

“... this was true or not in Pinter’s case, though I was with him once in the Café Anglais when he took exception to the waiter’s way of speaking. PINTER: I’ll have the fish toast with the parmesan custard. WAITER: No problem. PINTER: I wasn’t anticipating one. But back to the buses. There’s been a change in the way people speak as they roll ...”

“... grand reopening, two of its former bosses filed conflicting accounts of its recent history. Both John Tooley (1970-88) and Jeremy Isaacs (1988-97) describe the House’s considerable achievements over the past half-century; and Isaacs’s part in pushing through the magnificent rebuilding was heroic. What we still want to know is why things also went so ...”

“... of difficult boys who wouldn’t do well behind a desk, and for parents with limited funds (it took new recruits young – obviating the need for school fees and university allowances – and usually for free). For more sedate or intellectual boys, there was the law: as an attorney, which required years of expensive training but might eventually yield ...”

“... century and McWilliam fixes on Charles II’s Restoration in 1660 as the moment when the economy took off again after the uncertainties and destruction caused by the Civil Wars. The plague saw only a temporary retreat, and the population of London quadrupled between 1550 and 1700. It was rapidly overtaking Paris, and the West End, with its salubrious air and ...”

“... Except for two years as a fighter pilot in the RAF, John Colville was Churchill’s Private Secretary throughout the war, and again during his peacetime premiership of 1951-5. Some readers will enjoy his diaries mainly as a portrait of Churchill, whose blazing presence and wealth of eccentricity light up almost every page ...”

“... of Greek and Roman art. Ned’s chief assistant in this enterprise was the great love of his life, John Marshall. The two met at Oxford, where Marshall was an outstanding student. Many of his contemporaries believed that the young man might become a great Classical scholar, but he chose to serve as Ned’s secretary. He received a regular salary, but he was ...”

“... that would decisively weaken Moscow’s power, and was due to be signed the day after the coup took place. It’s a picture that lends credence to the view, which Yeltsin floats and does not decisively contradict, that the coup was being executed according to a scenario he had prepared. The idea was to have other people do the dirty work to clear ...”