“... him some momentary inner difficulty, and he records his efforts to change the mind of Anthony Eden, the Prime Minister. Heath was, it seems, totally against the subterfuge. But he would not have considered resigning. A chief whip could never resign. His job, at all costs, was to hold the Party together. This subordination of means to ends, of anything ...”

“... Robot spaceprobes went further afield. Venus, once imagined as a warm, tropical garden, an Eden for one of C.S. Lewis’s science fiction parables, turned out to be a hellish place: a surface hot enough to melt lead, covered by thunderous stormclouds which rain boiling acid. Mars, the planet on which astronomers once thought they could actually see ...”

“... Sure enough, in November 2000, the month after the Human Rights Act came into effect, Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones arrived in the Court of Appeal, seeking to hold the emergency injunction granted to them and to OK! magazine to stop OK!’s rival Hello! from publishing unauthorised photographs of the Douglases’ wedding in New York. Although ...”

“... from a long and successful vendetta against the Canadian minister of defence to bamboozling Sir Douglas Haig into shunting an unwelcome general sideways. His biographers differ over his role in bringing about the downfall of Asquith in 1916 and his replacement by a coalition government under Lloyd George. A.J.P. Taylor, in his 1972 biography, headed his ...”

“... and pictures were called ‘galloping tintypes’. In those carefree early years, Hollywood was an Eden of enterprise: innocent, full of fun and goodwill. ‘There was no hierarchy,’ according to Dwan, a story editor turned director. ‘Here’s how you became a “corporation” back then: you sat down at a table and you got a lawyer and you applied for a ...”

“... Green Council for the project, built between 1955 and 1966, were the trio of Francis Skinner, Douglas Bailey and an elder mentor, the legendary bringer of the torch of modern architecture to Britain from Europe, Berthold Lubetkin. There’s a received idea that Lubetkin was only peripherally involved in the design of Cranbrook. He was living in rural ...”

“... that, with his sense of history, he means the Lloyd George who was the patron of Field Marshal Douglas Haig, and the guarded admirer of Hitler, just as much as he means the Lloyd George who was the father of Welsh Disestablishment. And one must suppose that he comprehends FDR the originator of the war economy, and FDR the prime mover of American ...”

“... territory, but with another curious turn. For this strange emotion – what Douglas Adams might have called ‘the long toothache of the soul’ – isn’t a late 20th-century Hollywood add-on, but Tolkien himself, through and through. He theorised it in his 1938 lecture ‘On Fairy-Stories’ as ‘a fleeting glimpse of Joy beyond the ...”