“... the sea. Stevenson looked from the top window and saw his characters out there: Billy Bones, Long John Silver and the emerging cast of Kidnapped. The Channel was busy with the ghosts of real seafarers, such as the smuggler Slippery Rogers, who once came to Bournemouth in a boat rowed by forty men, carrying thirty thousand gallons of Dutch brandy. For ...”

“... Administration. The great cult film of all time in this respect is George Axelrod’s and John Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate, withdrawn from circulation after the Kennedy assassination but now available again in cassette form. And the great artistic and emblematic coincidence of the movie is the playing of the good guy by Frank Sinatra ...”

“... and a chaplet round his helm. Beside him his wife with a rich head-dress. A noble tomb. His son John was also many times MP. As Sir William sat as fellow MP for Oxford with Thomas Chaucer, I was naturally on familiar terms with him and startled even Rowse by giving his alabaster cheek a great smacking kiss. To the north of the north aisle of the short nave ...”

“... of the most striking examples described by Professor Wernham was the naval expedition led by Sir John Norris and Sir Francis Drake in 1589. If they had obeyed the Queen’s instructions and sailed to Santander and San Sebastian, he believes they would probably have been able to destroy the battered half of the Armada which was sheltering and re-equipping in ...”

“... have a memory of sitting there and feeling smug,’ she wrote of attending a class taught by John Crowe Ransom in 1938. She identified as a Trotskyite, placing herself on the anti-Stalinist left along with the writers she admired: Irving Howe, Dwight Macdonald and Mary McCarthy.Hardwick wanted to flee to New York, like ‘a provincial in Balzac, yearning ...”

“... a fact he doesn’t mention in his account of the incident in his memoirs or even in his diary. John McCloy, FDR’s assistant secretary of war, described it as ‘the most gallant thing I’ve ever seen’. Macmillan wasn’t one of those not infrequent war heroes who in peacetime are mild and eager to please. He remained dauntless and daunting in ...”

“... too dangerous to proceed, and shelves it. Instead, he agrees to a catastrophic deal, brokered by John Prescott, which commits him to handing over to Brown before the end of his second term, on the condition that Brown gives him his full support in the interim. As even Blair acknowledges, this was a terrible mistake. The agreement made no sense, because its ...”

“... articulate. Biographers don’t forget the history of himself that Dryden was to have given John Aubrey, but that he never gave. Dryden adapted Shakespeare, out of confidence and from a sense of necessity. I have chosen Hamlet as a point of comparison between them – a comparison, after all, provoked by Dryden himself – for a reason best given by ...”

“... done to their mother too. Their only real protection was the mythic and tequila-breathing Uncle John, who always knew what to say, crying out ‘this situation calls for enchiladas’ whenever things really disintegrated. He had a better handle on such situations than the Catholic Church. In a story called ‘Silence’, he snatches up Mamie’s Bible and ...”

“... too good to resist. ‘This officer of artillery never misses an opportunity for attack,’ John Gawsworth, an admiring contemporary, observed. William Rothenstein thought him ‘armed and armoured, like a tank, ready to cross any country, however rough and hostile’. He certainly had a genius for pugnacity, no doubt partly encouraged by the example ...”

“... than to elaborate principle into theory. His comprehension of Areo-pagitica, ‘a speech of Mr John Milton, for the liberty of unlicensed printing’, is profound in the immediacy with which it arrives at the principles at issue:The danger of such unbounded liberty, and the danger of bounding it, have produced a problem in the science of government, which ...”

“... War movement was the same man who had, half a century before, hounded Emma Goldman and John Reed and, later, put Leon Trotsky under surveillance in Mexico. This longevity makes Hoover’s biography a wonderful subject. Powers’s book is painfully neutral and somewhat pedestrian at times, but his authoritative command of his sources makes it ...”

“... organiser of Women’s Institutes and Country Women’s Organisations, and a decorous affair with John Pentland, grandson of Lord Aberdeen: ‘I can’t give him all with abandon and urgent desire.’ A hundred and fifty pages of schoolgirlish sentiments and solemnities (‘work is the only only only remedy for life’) is more than enough, and it is a relief ...”

“... all windy ideals in that it is eminently attainable and totally practicable. Going out, says Mr John Knightley, is unnatural behaviour ‘in defiance of the voice of nature, which tells man, in every thing given to his view or his feelings, to stay at home himself, and keep all under shelter that he can’. I try, as I read, to put into my voice the settled ...”

“... Jane Miller, who quotes this as one of the ‘views which men need women to have’, cites John Stuart Mill with equal pertinence: ‘We are perpetually told that women are better than men, by those who are totally opposed to treating them as if they were as good.’ She admires Clarissa for its seductive subtlety and humour, and to what degree ...”