“... has been clumsy – so clumsy in the case of basic White House operations that the Republican David Gergen had to be brought in. Even now, Clinton could find better people to work for him; but there is the deeper problem of his own decision-making. Clinton refuses to decide by experience and instinct as most of his predecessors have mostly done. He tries ...”

“... bonfire and his vigilance until his death ten years later effectively keep intruders like Edgar Johnson, Kaplan and the still-to-come Peter Ackroyd for ever out of the intimate recesses of his life. But in one respect Dickens, like Trollope, very invitingly opened a door for his future biographers by recording – in all its inwardness and sordid detail ...”

“... went to school: his mother, once a schoolteacher, taught him to read with the help of Gibbon and David Hume’s History of Great Britain, no doubt because they happened to be around the house at the time. The young Thomas read Tom Paine’s The Age of Reason at the age of 13 and became a lifelong freethinker: in 1925, he was to compose a foreword to the ...”

“... III by Joseph Pringle, the President of the Royal Society, and had become an acquaintance of Dr Johnson and a welcome member of his club. Banks liberally applied his wealth to assembling at his London house a parlour society of gentlemen amateurs, natural philosophers, foreign visitors and artists. Meanwhile, the much-heralded collection of foreign plant ...”

“... Smollett and Marryat are here being rewritten less for the excitement than for the feeling, as Dr Johnson said of Richardson: both O’Brian and Farrell share the wholly civilised, entirely good-humoured champagne Irishness of Laurence Sterne. Celtic fantasy maybe, but there was never anything less like a leprechaun.Both writers are immensely well-informed ...”

“... refuser (1853). Perhaps the two portrayals are not coincidental. In 1851, the Melville family read David Copperfield aloud as their evening entertainment. The pre-20th-century office worker saw himself as a cut above the unsalaried labouring masses, and was as ambivalent about his superiors, who were his only means of rising, as the rest of the working world ...”

“... most of the work: the cause of criminality, Theresa May was arguing, was criminality itself. Boris Johnson was quick to agree. When did it become a test of ideological purity to be able to say with a straight face that poverty and unemployment have nothing to do with the causes of crime? Who was the first politician to argue (if it can be called an ...”

“... ground, which suited both the landscape and its fabulously wealthy owner, who had, Brown told Dr Johnson, a chest full of gold in his bedroom. Not everything in Brown’s astonishingly successful practice went smoothly. Lakes sometimes leaked. At Audley End there was a misunderstanding about which way the river was meant to bend and at Cambridge he made a ...”

“... as tight as that, 18th century in a way Dorn would have appreciated. That was his period. He took Johnson’s Lives of the English Poets as his prose model. ‘My desire,’ Dorn said, ‘is to be/a classical poet.’ Compendium Books, the window for Dorn’s uncollected poetry, was one of the miracles of the late 1960s and early 1970s, parachuted into the ...”

“... the Thames. Waldorf and Nancy hosted epic house parties there, welcoming, among others, Shaw, Amy Johnson, Roosevelt (F.D.), Henry Ford, Asquith, Charlie Chaplin, J.M. Barrie, Churchill, Henry James, Edith Wharton, kings and queens and Mahatma Gandhi. The Archduke Franz Ferdinand spent a weekend there not long before his assassination. By the 1930s, the guest ...”

“... portrait and William Parry did an ensemble piece of Mai, Solander and Banks. Mai met the king, Dr Johnson and Fanny Burney; a play about him was performed at the Theatre Royal; he learned to play chess and backgammon, and many agreed with Mrs Thrale’s comment about the ‘savage’s good breeding’. Banks delighted in showing him off: an aristocratic ...”

“... powers of Ernest Bevin (‘his crowning achievement’, in the words of the new foreign secretary, David Lammy). Apps describes Bevin as ‘the man who would strike the initial spark that started Nato’ and who took the ‘first faltering steps’ towards its creation. But however long you pick over Bevin’s correspondence with George Marshall and Arthur ...”

“... had built her own Shakespearean shrine-cum-reading-room in 1742 – more than a decade before David Garrick commissioned what had previously been considered the first Temple of Shakespeare, complete with a statue by Roubiliac, for his own garden at Hampton – made me sufficiently curious to want to renew my attempt to see her former house and ...”

“... coffee plantations, and a handful threw in their lot with the FNLA. But the ethnic strains, which David Birmingham describes very well in his new history of Angola, were too great for this arrangement to last: in 1966 Jonas Savimbi, an ambitious and volatile character, left the FNLA to embark on a venture of his own, Unita (União Nacional para a ...”

“... of the high-profile economists they signed up as advisers in 2015, including Thomas Piketty and David Blanchflower (who tweeted ‘he has no economic policies’). Corbyn’s former policy chief, Neale Coleman, who was often described as the most effective member of his team, has now been announced as a top adviser to his opponent in the leadership ...”