“... For some reason, Read was particularly touched by what he saw as Pound’s change of heart towards Winston Churchill. The Pisan stockade remained on active service in literary criticism for rather longer than it did in the US army’s penal system. The opening paragraphs of the relevant chapter in Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era (1971) read like an extract from ...”

“... of an American intelligence officer. The first, published ten years ago, was Our Man in Mexico: Winston Scott and the Hidden History of the CIA. Long before Scott was named the Agency’s chief of station in Mexico City he had known Angleton in London during the war when both were working for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), predecessor of the ...”

“... instructive sign of the times. When Churchill died in 1965, we thought we were burying the past. Richard Crossman, a reluctant mourner at the funeral, wrote afterwards: ‘It felt like the end of an epoch, possibly even the end of a nation.’ But what era feels more remote today than that of Wilson and Heath, the great modernisers for whom modernity failed ...”

“... tutor, John Pentland Mahaffy, once crawled into a roomful of clergymen dressed in a tigerskin rug. Richard Whately, Archbishop of Dublin, could occasionally be seen swinging on chains in front of his palace, smoking a pipe. Even the modern-minded Charles Stewart Parnell was hag-ridden with superstition, while Yeats regularly conversed with spirits. Bram Stoker ...”

“... faces’ so as to distract Nasser’s attention) and, outside government but still having access, Winston Churchill, and on the French side the Foreign Minister Christian Pineau. Eden’s stand was peremptory, however: no Israelis. The message reached Ben-Gurion by way of the French and was at first not unwelcome. Now Yitzhak Shamir has given out the word ...”

“... True or false? 1. Winston Churchill sent in troops against striking miners at Tonypandy. 2. Stanley Baldwin confessed with ‘appalling frankness’ that he did not rearm because he would have lost the 1935 General Election. 3. Ernest Bevin said of the Labour Party’s relations with the Soviet Union: ‘Left can speak to Left ...”

“... He might, perhaps, be classified as a One-Nation Tory: but he was the cousin and friend of Richard Crossman and perfectly at home in the company of Labour politicians. One of his hallmarks is an interest in the ideas of the Left and a readiness to address them with a measure of respect. He is, indeed, strongly reminiscent of the type of army officer in ...”

“... to his tailor,’ Oscar Wilde (another patron) quipped, but obviously not when it came to paying. Winston Churchill was a regular customer, even having his suits cleaned and pressed at Poole’s, until an overzealous clerk sent a letter to Number 10 demanding that he settle his bills. In 1900, Poole’s was the most fashionable outfitters in the world, with ...”

“... Shakespearean actor Edwin Forrest (1806-72), a man described by his admiring modern biographer Richard Moody as ‘the first actor who refused to subscribe to the nation’s cultural inferiority complex’. As The Shakespeare Riots makes clear, however, Forrest was sufficiently affected by this inferiority complex to have spent much of his life telling the ...”

“... it is words that are the spring of action. (‘This tongue that runs so roundly in thy head,’ Richard II says, ‘Should run thy head from thy unreverent shoulders.’) The Crown has few pretences, and it isn’t Shakespeare, but it sets up a properly sophisticated relationship between words and actions, a relationship in which saying and not saying is ...”

“... the subsequent row over their mistreatment (and misbehaviour) convulsed British Liberals and gave Winston Churchill the opportunity to protest that ‘slavery’ was a ‘terminological inexactitude’. In Britain such Chinese as were not in the laundry business huddled in places like Limehouse, where they admitted society riff-raff to their opium dens ...”

“... public tears, especially when shed by a notorious tough nut, such as Oliver Cromwell, Lord Eldon, Winston Churchill or Margaret Thatcher. The Protector was repeatedly denounced for his ostentatious pretences of piety and feeling: he was ‘fluent in his tears’, endowed with ‘spungy eyes and a supple conscience’. In The Masque of Anarchy, Shelley sneers ...”

“... a Western consensus developed that the intervention was something best forgotten. Indeed, both Richard Nixon in 1972 and Margaret Thatcher twelve years later succeeded so well in this that they were able to assure Soviet interlocutors that their countries had never been at war with each other.There was plenty of reason to see the intervention as nasty ...”

“... ascribed jokes and smart sayings to well-known figures such as the poet John Skelton or the fool Richard Tarleton. Jest-book-style anecdotes were often transcribed alongside more serious quotations in manuscript notebooks compiled by individual readers. So in 1601, the lawyer John Manningham recorded in what’s usually called his ‘diary’ (though really ...”

“... series which concerns his finances, letters to his legal adviser, William Pyne, and to his tailor, Richard Culverwell. There has been a long upper-class tradition of owing money to one’s tailor – which, no doubt, explains the inordinate prices charged in those days. Disraeli, characteristically, went a step further and actually borrowed money from his ...”