“... Ben Jonson is remembered as a master of English comedy, but you would hardly think so from his portrait. The earliest dateable likeness is the engraving by Robert Vaughan, done in the mid 1620s, when Jonson was around fifty. The face is jowly, bearded, dour, heavily lived-in. The shadowed eyes remind me of photos of Tony Hancock ...”

“... loyal of friends. He’s a half-breed and a bastard. Part Vietnamese and part French, he speaks English with an American accent. He’s good at getting banged up, consigned to the hospital bed, the bin, the re-education camp, a dank basement or an empty warehouse staring into the barrel of a gun. He’s the offspring of paedophilia. He’s lonely, often in ...”

“... food faddists. He can be caustically funny about their lunatic fringes, whether vegetarian (the English chemist Halliburton described beef tea bouillon as ‘simply an ox’s urine in a tea cup’), carnivorous (Dr Salisbury urged a diet containing three pounds of meat a day), masticatory (retired businessman Horace Fletcher recommended 50 chews per ...”

“... poets for not getting their facts right. The most notable of these is the great Classical scholar Richard Bentley (1662-1742), who judged the poets by the standards of his own rigorous 18th-century rationalism; a good many people have remarked that his edition of Paradise Lost, in which he used the theory that the text has been interpolated by an amanuensis ...”

“... Sassoons, one wonders, to catalogue its journey down that profound dull tunnel? Nancy and Richard Newell’s book suggests that they do, quoting a poem by a Soviet paratrooper who was killed in Afghanistan more than a year ago, a young man who wrote to his lover about his own future death: He did not live beyond the hour before dawn He fell on his ...”

“... Sir, The quicker Richard Branson sells Virgin Railways and moves on the better. The last two occasions my wife has had the misfortune to use his wretched railway she has been 60 minutes and 110 minutes late. We are sick and tired of his artificial smile (it reminds us of Mr Blair’s) and his publicity forever in the press and on television ...”

“... somewhat circumscribed by the succession. ‘Long live the revolution,’ he said, practising his English. Then we settled down for his three-hour address, which was being broadcast live. Occasions like this always make me wish I’d brought a picnic basket. The speech was pretty typical. Some facts (for example, that the increase in oil revenues brought ...”

“... of the untold story. He is the author of eight novels, the last three of which are available in English (from Harvill) as All Souls, A Heart So White and Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me. All three are admirably translated by Margaret Jull Costa, who not only catches the meanings of words with grace and precision, but gets rhythms of thought, and even ...”

“... and pirates, as the Company’s French, Dutch and Portuguese rivals pointed out, were always English. The Company’s profits fell, their splendid dividends (50 per cent or even more) dwindled, and the shareholders saw that trading might have to cease. It was not surprising, therefore, that Bellomont was able to induce several of the most important ...”

“... social and economic history and more world history or the inclusion of more modern literature in English and modern languages courses. What my own children have had the opportunity of learning at school has seemed much richer than the rather fuddy-duddy offerings of my own Fifties grammar-school education. When future historians come to write the social ...”

“... Certainly the history of what actually happened in the war has only just begun to be written. Richard Overy’s impressive overview is a reminder of how poorly the English-speaking reader has been served with histories of the war on the Eastern Front. Although it was of a far greater order of magnitude than the war in ...”

“... Charles I’s capture and execution the conflict continued. ‘Long wars make men inhumane,’ Richard Ward wrote in The Anatomy of Warre: ‘that is, at first sinne seems to us loathing, but often sinning makes sinne seeme nothing … where before [a soldier] ever entered into the wars, he thought he could never be so cruell, as to dash the childrens ...”

“... with a council road gang, have known each other for fifteen years and talked only about football. Richard – who went to college for a bit and is deeply scholarly about the music press of the late Seventies – has ‘his records, his friends, papers, Dostoyevsky and a dream of owning a decent second-hand record shop’. Dostoyevsky is ‘that rarity of ...”

“... and his greatest. Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942), was one – J.K. Galbraith told Richard Swedberg – that he himself disdained. It was too popular. His first, which he wrote in 1908, when he was 25, irritated the historical economists, who dominated the subject in Austria, with its defence of the new marginalism. His second, The Theory of ...”

“... tackle aspects of British history which would be spurned by British publishers. Without a doubt, Richard Altick chose the best decade of Punch to study, for in many a later period momentous events went unnoticed in its pages and a social conscience was not easy to detect in the weekly output of ‘subsistence journalism’ (Altick’s phrase). By ...”