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“... smooth and successful progress from a manse near a linoleum factory in a small Fife town to Rideau Hall, Ottawa the official residence of the Governor-General of Canada (his first book was published when he was 19, and at 22, while still an undergraduate, he was given an entry in Who’s Who); by the ease with which he wrote, composing his novels ‘at ...”

“... Si monumentum requiris, circumspice. Even those, John Campbell suggests, who have little or no memory of Margaret Thatcher, live in a world she created; and from which there is no going back. More than any other British prime minister, even Gladstone, she conforms to Max Weber’s type of the modern demagogic politician: the leader who appeals directly to the electorate over the heads of the party machine; and who subordinates the machine to his or her political personality ...”

“... For a female handler at the top of her game, there can only be a glittery skirt suit from St John, a brand long associated with financially secure American grandmothers, which now does a roaring second-hand trade on Facebook through groups called ‘St John Dog Show Outfits’ and ‘St ...”

“... think good for her. In an effort to lift Anne out of her invidious situation as village witch, John Wylde fixes her up with a job at Making Hall, the home of Benjamin Greave, leading cloth merchant in the Lady Well district. At Making Hall Anne meets Oliver, the boss’s son, and they ...”

“... 1863. The few historical figures introduced to bolster the movie’s plot – the future Tammany Hall boss William M. Tweed, Archbishop John Hughes and the showman P.T. Barnum – are either transported backwards in time or engage in alliances with gangs that defy the actual marginality of these gangs within the class and ...”

“... what took place at Beijing airport on Monday, 21 February 1972. It’s also the opening scene of John Adams’s opera Nixon in China, premiered in Houston in 1987, and staged again at the London Coliseum over a few evenings last summer. An actual occurrence then, but also, as Adams and his librettist Alice Coleman understood, a brightly lit performance with ...”

“... undignified and unnatural circus tricks. At the end of this formidable survey of the aristocracy John Beckett notes that they have survived into the late 20th century ‘as protectors of the nation’s heritage’ and that some ‘even argue that as collectors of beautiful objects over time their families were thinking not merely of self-interest but of the ...”

“... also looked after his father’s jobs in Cambridge, probably including the grand new chapel for St John’s College. Then, suddenly, according to Stamp, ‘some of his old Eton friends persuaded him to enter the University.’ At 24, his was a mature admission. He graduated top of the Moral Sciences Tripos for 1866. Next, he won a prize for an essay on ‘The ...”

“... it adversity, that such beauty does exist.’ Baraka made the observation in his liner notes to John Coltrane’s album Live at Birdland, which includes ‘Alabama’, an elegy for the four girls murdered in the 1963 Birmingham Church bombing.I thought of Baraka’s words at New York’s Riverside Church last Saturday, at the funeral of the alto saxophonist ...”

“... Of the occasion, at the Seventh Congress of People’s Deputies, when he strode from the hall, he says: ‘When deputies who are snickering, confident of their absolute impunity, are looking at you either point-blank or furtively, it’s hard to react correctly or appropriately. You cannot imagine how difficult it is. In this situation, I feel better ...”

“... to have had any ‘initiates’. The format of these two books is that of the circus or the music-hall. Turn follows fast on turn, in a frantic accumulation of wonders. For a specimen performance, I take that of Skarioffszky, a very Hungarian Hungarian, who comes on stage in the Impressions having trained a giant but docile worm to produce music from a zither ...”

“... scale’. (In 1999, both Springsteen and the E Street Band were elected into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.) In 1975, the success of their third album, Born to Run – six million copies sold in the US alone – put Springsteen on the cover of both Newsweek (‘Making of a Rock Star’) and Time (‘Rock’s New Sensation’). By then he had defined his ...”

“... movements and events: the Catharists, the Brethren of the Free Spirit, the Lollards, the Ranters, John of Leyden and the French Commune. Marcus draws these and others into his secret history of the 20th century because he is interested in revolution and apocalypse: the kind of secret history which moves not in a world elsewhere, beyond the periphery of our ...”

“... glad to be in his favour.’ This will all seem familiar to aficionados of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall: in the following reign, Thomas Cromwell was the apotheosis (or nadir) of these ‘new men’. As Steven Gunn argues in his new book, a work of characteristic meticulousness, not only did these men encapsulate the mood, workings and functioning of Henry ...”

“... sunrise at Stonehenge. How was that image created? The Stonehenge connection goes back to John Aubrey, who first recognised the monuments at Avebury in 1649 and then spent nearly fifty years writing and talking about, but never quite finishing, his projected Templa Druidum. He was followed by William Stukeley, Anglican clergyman and ‘pagan ...”