“... to protect or nurture the Indian textile industry against the competition from Lancashire, Lord William Bentinck lamented that ‘the misery hardly finds parallel in the history of commerce. The bones of the cotton weavers are bleaching the plains of India.’ It is of the essence of imperial power, old-style or new-style, that it accepts no formal ...”

“... interested in his own place in the firmament’. According to Blair’s chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, McGuinness tended to defer to Adams. If McGuinness was ever negotiating alone he would say he needed to discuss a proposal with Adams. Adams, in similar circumstances, sometimes kept his own counsel. In June 2004 Adams ‘very unusually’, according to ...”

“... the first woman barrister, Ivy Williams. The first private to win a field-marshal’s baton, Sir William Robertson, is missing. Billy Smart, the circus proprietor, is in, though not Sir Alan Cobham, whose private air force introduced millions to flying, or Sir Donald Wolfit. Tom Webster, the sports cartoonist, gains his niche, but not ...”

“... of fiction, and by implication relate the two. He embarked on his own biography of the sculptor William Wetmore Story in a spirit of pure cynicism. Duty and piety required it, and he would supply the goods accordingly. The modern biographer is apt to construct a persona for his reader in a much more pretentious spirit. Instead of the ‘felt life’ with ...”

“... it bad for them and for their art, and he deprecated the propensity when he found it in his son William Butler Yeats: ‘I wish Willie had Jack’s tender gracious manner, and did not sometimes treat me as if I was a black beetle.’ To judge by these entrancing, life-enhancing letters, John Butler Yeats never treated anybody as a black beetle. The contrast ...”

“... cast processes out of the church); a homespun cacophony.Two biographies, by Paul Kildea and Neil Powell, intelligently appraise this official and unofficial Britten, and are rich with contradiction. Britten was quietly radical and quietly conservative. He was a joiner and a separatist: he lived most of his life in Suffolk, well away from London, which he ...”

“... if helpfully complaisant, philanderer. Among other men she was attracted to, the novelist William Gerhardie proved to have sadistic tendencies which she didn’t enjoy, while the theatre and film director Tony Richardson was so nervous of her that when lodging with the Smiths in St John’s Wood he hardly dared to take a bath. Manning’s generally ...”

“... day, with the setting sun doing something wonderful with the sandstone in the precincts of Lake Powell, we had a medley that included Clarence Williams (‘You’re Bound to Look Like a Monkey When You Get Old’), Van Morrison (‘Caravan’ and ‘The Healing Game’), and Valaida Snow, the remarkable, hard-swinging woman jazz trumpeter and ...”

“... His opponents in the Monday Club liked to identify Heath as the original of Widmerpool – Anthony Powell disavowed the attribution. In any case, Widmerpool would never have been able to lose himself in music or sailing, or to achieve such high standards in either. Rising to wartime lieutenant-colonel, Heath certainly impressed his superiors, but he remained ...”

“... all these and others, though clearly different, are unimaginable without Pound, early Eliot, William Carlos Williams and perhaps Wallace Stevens as forerunners. This is the main stream of modern American poetry. In England the picture is very different. Pound is grudgingly acknowledged, distrusted, kept at a distance. Eliot holds his place, but not the ...”

“... principally responsible for devising the ERP and ensuring it was carried out: Marshall himself, William Clayton, Paul Hoffman, Richard Bissell and Arthur Vandenberg. All are portrayed as extraordinarily talented, dedicated and selfless individuals who acted out of a classical sense of republican virtue and, like Cincinnatus or George Washington, returned to ...”

“... to terrorise, absolute terror terrorises absolutely. Th-th-that’s all, folks!’ The narrator, William Cowling, fails to become a terrorist, since he is too frightened, but his girlfriend, Sarah Strouch, passes the test and, by 1980, she is saying: ‘Terrorism is a state of mind, but nobody gets terrified anymore.’ Some two hundred pages later, she is ...”

“... was available to a young man of talent, who soon ingratiated himself with the star of the day, William Pitt. Though he was an instinctive Whig, Canning’s ambition and admiration for Pitt took him over to the Tory side, and eventually into rivalry with Castlereagh. A reader could easily get lost as Hunt delves into the tedious politics of the age with ...”

“... of the text. This and the following points have been brilliantly documented by H. Jefferson Powell in ‘The Original Understanding of Original Intent’ (Harvard Law Review, March 1985). The Philadelphia Convention had not been authorised to draft a new constitution: rather it was to amend the Articles of Confederation. Against the Anti-Federalist ...”

“... Biography there are photographs of David Niven, Diana Dors, Eric Morecambe, John Betjeman and William Walton. Dors has a leering ‘Come up and read me sometime’ expression on her face and Niven wears his yacht-club greeter’s smile. Morecambe seems to be laughing at one of his own jokes. Amiable images, devised no doubt to lure us into a placidly ...”