“... advocated, and blamed their failures on the dead weight of resistance at all levels of society. John Cook, Charles I’s prosecutor, said that ‘we would have enfranchised the people, if the nation had not more delighted in servitude than in freedom.’ William Sedgwick told the generals that ‘not one of a hundred will own what you set down as the public ...”

“... of aristocratic families in decline, who retained pretentions to mighty connections (such as King John Sobieski) even as they subsided into ruin. His father Jan Norwid died in a debtors’ prison, and his mother died when he was only four. The Polish youth of the period was devoted to plotting and to fantasies of vengeance. In secret conventicles, forbidden ...”

“... First Crusade was that the various Islamic powers never realised what was actually happening; and John Gillingham, the Lion-Heart’s biographer, could scarcely complain of his discussion of the Acre massacre (on which Mr Finucane is more lurid). If Newby’s Saladin somehow fails to inspire, this is partly because of his low-key, if agreeable style, but ...”

“... the story of the genocide following Cülloden, must go to the ‘Fort Augustus’ section of John Prebble’s Culloden. It was published seven years before those historical books by Linklater but it isn’t in their bibliographies – nor is Prebble’s The Highland Clearances. No doubt they too are valuable but ...”

“... his colleagues could be trusted with it. Desperate for advice, he called on Albert Einstein and St-John Perse. Neither was much help: both, on balance, counselled ‘staying with his country’. A vacation in Poland helped him to make up his mind: ‘The whole country was bursting with suppressed hatred for its rulers and their Russian employers ... Terror is ...”

“... gang of vicious and often drunken thugs, murderers and fornicators’) to the novels of John Updike. In the old days – stretching from the 12th century to the Second World War – there was marriage and there was adultery (or thoughts of adultery): on the one hand, stability, a house and a dowry; on the other, longing, desire and despair. This ...”

“... do is watch it And hope that this time our side doesn’t botch it. The Secretary of Defence, John Nott, Has made a whopping balls-up in the House. The Foreign Secretary’s on the spot, Loudly accused of being short of nous. The top gun-boat exponent of the lot, A prancing lion where once crouched a mouse, Is Michael Foot, who now speaks for the nation ...”

“... out as a rather small man, try to enlarge him by Latinising his going. But an epitaph made by Pope John III in the Church of the Holy Apostles in Rome hasn’t much bearing upon a man who would have hated to receive it. The Latin reminds me that there is far too much of it in this book. McDowell and Webb write so well in English that it is supererogatory to ...”

“... obvious choices: it does not include Isaiah Berlin’s The Hedgehog and the Fox, for instance, nor John Bayley’s Tolstoy and the Novel. Though not biographical, they might have been useful: after all, everyone already knows that Sonya and her sister Tanya were the joint models for Natasha in War and Peace. On the other hand, Ms Edwards has read In the ...”

“... a major contribution to it. Nineteenth-century intellectuals had a choice to make, spelt out by John Stuart Mill: either to follow the lead of the idealist and Romantic Coleridge, or of the materialist and political liberal Bentham. Judging by Mary McCarthy’s examples, imaginative writers tend towards quietism or the political Right, and it is easy to see ...”

“... police forces; and terrorist groups of Catholic rightists organised by cabals who opposed Pope John XXIII’s proposals to reconcile the liberal leftist Catholic priests seeking to apply – generally with anarchistic zeal – the ideological thesis of rapprochement between the Church and the poor. (These, of course, were only the principal groups of ...”

“... distinction of that earlier generation of fellows: not just AJPT and Lewis, but Bruce McFarlane, John Morris, Rupert Cross, Cyril Darlington, J.Z. Young, Sir Peter Medawar, Gilbert Ryle ... the line stretched on. No doubt it was all more humdrum in reality, but one was left with the impression of great intellectual giants inhabiting a world of mad English ...”

“... with the aid of a coin edge. No such task presented itself. Instead a 4000-word letter from Mr John MacArthur introduced me to the world of plate-collecting. Eight million platers can’t be wrong and 450,000 joined the ranks in 1983 alone. Many of them bought heavily into Rockwell. The new offer ‘A Young Girl’s Dream’ is now available at £12.45 and ...”

“... told they had ‘set all the town together by the ears, which is the true office of a Puritan’. John White, the patriarch of Dorchester, and his allies, got a touring company of players banned, only to be attacked as a ‘counterfeit company and pack of Puritans’. It is one of the skills of this book that it encourages sympathy with both sides in the ...”

“... on the night before. Elderly troubleshooters have tended to be just that in America – shooters. John Wayne in True Grit creaked in the saddle, aimed straight, and punched people in the usual places. He uttered platitudes, but at least they were home-grown platitudes. Why was it felt necessary to dress Mr Van Cleef in preposterous robes, issue him with a ...”