“... outcome of individual idiosyncrasies. ‘What makes a book good is what you leave out,’ John Garraty once remarked. Obviously, selection is crucial in a work that tries to cover five centuries. But in this case, too much has been left out of the story, especially once the book reaches the 20th century, when the US acted most forcefully as an empire ...”

“... in Paris in 1919 to make peace with more understanding than many previous writers, following John Maynard Keynes, have done. The sudden end of the war surprised most Allied leaders, who had anticipated fighting well into 1919. Victory seemed fragile and the state of the world in 1919, with the break up of empires, revolution, unrest and widespread ...”

“... always took around with him. (At one point he could eat only Bengers baby foods.) His portrait by John Singer Sargent, which adorns the cover of this volume, makes him look, in the view of Sargent’s biographer, like ‘a business executive’. He attracted neither the adoration nor the hatred that was directed at the more charismatic Curzon and ...”

“... a significant new biography of Captain Cook by Nicholas Thomas, and many other substantial works. John Sugden and Andrew Lambert have just produced biographies of Horatio Nelson, and a further biography by R.J.B. Knight is eagerly awaited. The Royal Navy is doing very well, thank you. Moreover, all kinds of scholar, many of them not British, have discovered ...”

“... According to Henry James, reviewing John Cross’s life of George Eliot, the creations which brought her renown were of the incalculable kind, shaped themselves in mystery, in some intellectual back-shop or secret crucible, and were as little as possible implied in the aspect of her life. There is nothing more singular or striking in Mr Cross’s volumes than the absence of any indication, up to the time the Scenes of Clerical Life were published, that Miss Evans was a likely person to have written them; unless it be the absence of any indication, after they were published, that the deeply studious, concentrated, home-keeping Mrs Lewes was a likely person to have produced their successors ...”

“... rightly thinks this to be probably apocryphal, without adding that the remark was first made by John Wilkes in the 1760s when it had more political relevance. None of the set saw active service in the 1914-18 war. They were either too old – the youngest was 32 – or too unfit, but Waldorf Astor insisted on joining the Army and was put in charge of ...”

“... of mise en scène and all-round plausibility, The Emperor of Ocean Park lies somewhere south of John Grisham and north of Nancy Drew. It is long-winded, shoddily put together and riddled with repetitions and small inconsistencies: characters are introduced twice, facts stated and restated as if for the first time; a pool table appears mid-scene (as if from ...”

“... he be required to remove his trousers. Lowe, it turns out, was a sergeant-major in the war, and John Le Mesurier, who played the limp Sergeant Wilson, was a captain. Now Lowe was playing a bank manager who had come up the hard way, and Le Mesurier, his chief clerk, was a pampered ex-public schoolboy, incapable of giving orders (‘Oh, Wilson! Bark it ...”

“... Man?) good looks made him, too, a valuable commodity at the Caroline Court. This was John Churchill, toy boy of the Duchess of Cleveland, one of Charles II’s discarded mistresses. Churchill, too, was treading a familiar trail: his elder sister was the Duke of York’s concubine. They married secretly, against the wishes of both families, and ...”

“... all Conservatives were similarly opposed to doctrine and ideology. To choose just two examples, John Buchan, like Disraeli a novelist and Conservative MP, maintained in the 1920s that Conservatism was ‘above all things a spirit not an abstract doctrine’. And ten years later, Stanley Baldwin warned a Canadian audience not to change the basis of their ...”

“... August 1517. There the ageing maestro showed them three paintings: two of these, the enigmatic St John the Baptist and The Virgin and Child with St Anne, are now in the Louvre; the third, which is almost certainly the Mona Lisa, was described by de Beatis (and, it is implied, by Leonardo himself) as the portrait of ‘a certain Florentine lady, done from life ...”

“... have latched onto the issue. ‘Bioethicists are to ethics what whores are to sex,’ Richard John Neuhaus wrote in the conservative periodical First Things. Dan Callahan, a founder of the Hastings Center, told the New York Times: ‘This is a semi-scandalous situation for my field.’ The Center for Science in the Public Interest issued a press release ...”

“... I have a goodly heritage.’ Unexpectedly, however, William Jennings Bryan, who prosecuted John Thomas Scopes for promoting evolutionary theory in the 1920s, turns out to have been less of a villain than he is usually painted. Scopes may have famously defended evolution, but he was also a keen advocate of eugenics, a creed which the anti-Darwinist ...”

“... experiences than ever before. ‘Since Christmas,’ Accidia wrote in 1955, ‘we calculate that John has spoken to over four hundred people – I to about four, and those would be the dustman, fishman, policeman and the woman from one of the Harewood Estate lodges.’ The life of the postwar married woman, diminished and degraded as it was, was whipped up ...”

“... on any aspirations.’ Ayers shared the platform with the English writer and discharged convict John Barker, formerly of the Angry Brigade: ‘I see my particular past either slagged off or romanticised, both of which I find distasteful.’ Spiotta’s novel does, in some ways, present the suffering of the 1960s as a package; it also romanticises its ...”