“... movie – I don’t see too many movies but I try to see them on weekends when I am at the Western White House or in Florida – and the movie I selected, or, as a matter of fact, my daughter Tricia selected it, was Chisum with John Wayne. It was a Western. FDR was known to admire Myrna Loy and Ike to enjoy watching shoot-’em-ups; underdog Harry Truman had ...”

“... attended it. His characters are historically real, although perhaps not historically important: William Grimshaw, the fanatical wandering preacher, and his associates, early martyrs – the word is not too strong – in the cause of the simplest and most primitive of trade unions; a cast of six-year-old children sent to work in the pits, of narrow-minded ...”

“... and Manet in the Déjeuner sur l’Herbe, as did the American Thomas Eakins in his painting of William Rush carving the Schuylkill River. The point in all these paintings is to distract the viewer from the conditioned simplicity of sexual allegory, itself resembling that of sexual response, so that we feel an equal participation with the sexes as well as ...”

“... languished as a series of one-term nonentities succeeded the popular hero Andrew Jackson in the White House. Who could become excited by John Tyler, Millard Fillmore or Franklin Pierce? The Senate chamber, by contrast, was inhabited by giants, notably the ‘great triumvirate’ of John C. Calhoun, Henry Clay and Daniel Webster, as well as eloquent ...”

“... a remarkably handsome newspaper, much more spacious in its page layouts and crisper in its black/white contrasts than its rival, the Sunday Times, which looked untidy and grey by comparison. Throughout the 1950s it was the dominant ‘quality’ Sunday paper, certainly in its cultural and political influence among the young if not always in terms of its ...”

“... in Staffordshire, a theme park of redundant symbols: lions, bears, eagles. There is even a ghostly white, blindfolded man who Peter Ashley thinks might be a late tribute to soldiers executed for walking away from the battle. The next station, on our walk to the west, leaves us frustrated. The marzipan-and-betel-juice grandeur of St Pancras is ...”

“... that the Oscar Wilde of ‘The Decay of Lying’ would feel far more at home in the America of William Jefferson Clinton than in that of its most esteemed founding father. For whatever else may be accused of falling into decay these days, public mendacity has surely enjoyed a robust revival. The most memorable quotations from our national leaders are no ...”

“... Good. Now I’m heading the right direction. Away from the quaint North. Away from lobsters and white churches and Civil War graveyards and cracker barrel bazaars. Toward the swamps, the Bayou, the Cajuns, the cotton mouth, the Mardi Gras, the crocodile. The story exemplifies the imaginative gift which has made Shepard uniquely successful in his attempts ...”

“... sin? Unless of course she was not entirely innocent. After all, she was not physically forced ... William Empson, Donaldson notes, found St Augustine’s insinuation ‘caddish’, which it probably is. But one can fail to be a gentleman and still make sense, and even get onto the church calendar. Why does Lucretia kill herself? This is in part a question ...”

“... the rivalries of race, region and class, pronunciation is obviously important, and grammar too, as William Labov has effectively shown in his studies of Black English: but the most visible differentiations are borne by idiom and vocabulary. What you call things raises you up, puts you down, or sets you just where you choose to be. (When I was a boy, we called ...”

“... as religious dogma. At the centre of the stage, swaggering in Stetson hat and cowboy boots, is William Clark, National Security Adviser, who had been nominated by Reagan to the Californian Supreme Court of Justice though he’d never made it out of law school. When appointed to take charge of all foreign policy, he cheerfully admitted he knew nothing about ...”

“... to wage his global war on terror. Yet with George W. Bush a president in the mould of William McKinley or Warren Harding – an affable man of modest talent whose rise in national politics could be attributed primarily to his perceived electability – Cheney and his collaborators were engaged in an effort to enhance their own clout. Bush might ...”

“... to help her make financial decisions; she also met men at them, among them her first husband, William Chaney, a fellow spiritualist. In 1875 Wellman told Chaney she was pregnant; he denied being the father. After he went out, she took a small dose of laudanum, borrowed a pistol from a neighbour and then, according to reports in the press, shot herself in ...”

“... textile industry for three generations, and Edward expanded the family business by partnering with William Scofield, his Harvard classmate and Florence’s brother. A leading wool manufacturer, Edward bought the fanciest house in town (his son would call it an ‘orgulous pile’) and a steam yacht (which his wife promptly made him sell) before dying of ...”

“... Spitting Image to present her forty years later as a gin-swilling commoner. Since then death and William Shawcross have done little to humanise her. His biography was pious to a degree and, like his equally fulsome edition of her letters, much too long.* Despite all of which a personality, powerful and in some ways admirable and unusual, manages to break ...”