“... Richard Feynman was one of the élite group of American and British physicists who developed atomic weapons with the Manhattan project in the Second World War. He flashed back into the public eye in 1965, when he won a share of the Nobel physics prize, and again two decades later when his formidable presence on the committee inquiring into the crash of the Challenger space shuttle forced the cause of the disaster into the open ...”

“... was the long, emotion-charged speech with which, as Israeli Ambassador, he acutely embarrassed Richard Nixon, who ‘sat mute with his eyes averted’. When his term as Chief of Staff was up, Rabin asked for the Washington Embassy, to the acute surprise of those who found it difficult to visualise him as a diplomat and despite the pain it must have caused ...”

“... The greatest story since the Resurrection was how Mencken described the 1935 trial of Bruno Richard Hauptmann for the kidnapping and murder of the Lindbergh baby. Among the three hundred-odd reporters present, besides Mencken, were Damon Runyon, Ford Madox Ford, Edna Ferber, Alexander Woollcott, Heywood Broun, Walter Winchell and Joseph Alsop, who was required to write no less than ten thousand words a day for the Herald Tribune ...”

“... making’ of Sir Arthur Bryant’s three-volume life – that is, a sort of apprentice Pepys only. Richard Ollard’s Pepys (1974) is less strangely proportioned from this point of view, but again there is a deliberate attempt to set the familiar Pepys in a context of broader aspiration and achievement. Much of the new Companion volume rehearses the findings ...”

“... were gathered in a mini-collection of manuscript epigrams presented to his wife’s mother, Lady Rogers, which Harington lovingly bound together with a presentation copy of his Ariosto. In other poems in this collection he berated his mother-in-law for her scolding tongue and for her tendency to side with his wife in domestic disputes. We can only imagine ...”

“... Make and Break, transcends its setting, a Frankfurt trade fair, touching on a general gloom. Mrs Rogers is treating Garrard, a goatish sales rep, to the fruits of Buddhism. It is late in the day. Elsewhere assignations are arranged, faces stuffed, drinks swilled. Mrs Rogers’s seducer is impatient of nirvana; besides his ...”

“... Richard Hamilton’s ‘Protest Pictures’ have turned the galleries of Inverleith House in Edinburgh into a time-machine.* News events from the last fifty years flash up in every room, from a drug bust and a student murder in the 1960s, through the Troubles in the 1970s and 1980s, to the Gulf debacles of the last two decades ...”

“... that see in a cloud of metaphysics, and remained absorbed in it’ (this is 1751). ‘The younger [Richard] Beck-ford, who had been announced for a genius, and had laid a foundation for being so, by studying magazines and historical registers ...’ Or this Tacitean thrust at the French: ‘While they were purchasing the instructions of our ...”

“... the House of Lords enough of a theatrical show? What special purpose does the council serve? David Rogers’s book, only the second published on the subject in the last hundred years (the first was Sir Almeric FitzRoy’s The History of the Privy Council), seeks to understand the institution by looking at its history. Ancient though they are, the council’s ...”

“... away in the US, in his first year of teaching at Yale (his students the following year included Richard and Su Rogers and Norman Foster), and there were no faxes or e-mails to facilitate long-distance exchanges. Yet the scintillating design, finalised late in 1960, was, according to the client, Edward Parkes, very much a ...”

“... as we can. The idea may sound fanciful, but it is pursued with remarkable force and fascination in Richard Holmes’s study. Richard Savage, the young Johnson’s alter ego, was a poor and talented writer whom Johnson had met in Grub Street. Each took a fancy to the other, and they became companions in want in London’s ...”

“... ever read) – Flecknoe, Mac Flecknoe aka Thomas Shadwell, Colley Cibber, piddling Theobald, Richard Blackmore – teems through the Grub Street grunge of Pope’s greatest poem, the mock-heroic satire on books and fools and publishing called The Dunciad. The dynasty of dunces established the notion that literary traditions and bloodlines do exist, since ...”

“... To Victorian readers, ‘Grub Street’ had a historical rather than a timely reference. As Pat Rogers brilliantly demonstrated in his Grub Street: Studies in a Subculture (1972), it then meant primarily the squalid milieu of the hacks whom Pope had skewered with malicious wit in the Dunciad. Their archetype was ...”

“... but rather inconsequential’ by their American interpreter – took place between William Rogers, the US secretary of state, and Ji Pengfei, China’s foreign minister. In Kissinger’s account, these dealt with lesser matters, such as trade and exchanges. Kissinger himself had bigger fish to fry, not least in his late-night meetings with Qiao ...”

“... appreciated the technique. Shepard even got to work on his own name. Junked the family name of Rogers and took his second name of Shepard in its place. Samuel Rogers became Sam Shepard. It’s important to understand that what Shepard was renaming was his own existence. He wasn’t coming up with a fancy nom de ...”