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“... technical and aesthetic. Unlike most earlier book illustrators, he worked in wood, not copper. He took a vernacular skill and made it into an art, transforming the rude woodcut which had formerly been relegated to the local tavern wall into an elegantly executed image of sufficient sophistication to find its way into a gentleman’s library. Bewick perfected ...”

“... with the agility of Jack Tar. She easily outlived her son. But during his childhood her ill-health took precedence over his. While she was cossetted, the sickly Lewis (as he was then called) was left to the charge of ‘Cummy’, the nurse who slept in his room until he was ten and who drove him into night terrors that only she could calm. Her entertainments ...”

“... and News from Tartary, which is still better, succeeded so well because their author instinctively took to heart the advice of Dryden’s heroine. We cross Tartary on a daily basis, not so much pleased with seeing more as interested in what can be found to eat, what the weather’s like, how the camels come to reveal their personalities. This is the simplest ...”

“... pine trees and vices of the south’. (Not of the north, interestingly enough. Gothicism never took root in the Scottish background which Sir Walter had made his own, and where even barbarous old custom was healthy and bracing as well as picturesque.) Yet like the Magic Realists Angela Carter used the genre to make her views over-explicit, incidentally ...”

“... drunk at work. Yuri Andropov, the short-lived successor to the lax (and heavy-drinking) Brezhnev, took the KGB route: harassing of drunks. Gorbachev, in his first manifestation as an idealistic back-to-Leninism leader, copied Lenin’s tactic: he banned it. This evokes a passionate denunciation from Pokhlebkin, much of it wholly justified: In the course of ...”

“... describes, in dramatic detail, one exemplary episode from several years past: an evening stroll he took through a field near Salem, Massachusetts, where many ‘supposed bewitchings’ occurred during the famous witch-hunt of 1692. ‘Alone with my thoughts and the night sounds . . . I convinced myself that I believed in Satan and all his evil works ...”

“... made Catharine Macaulay. Partly through her husband’s interests, and partly because her brother, John Sawbridge, was a radical City MP and alderman, she was drawn into the company of the so-called Real Whigs, dissenting intellectuals like Thomas Hollis, Richard Barron, Sylas Neville and Caleb Fleming. She also met and initially admired ...”

“... of them was that the Church bought out its partners at an early stage and at a generous price. Sir John Hall, the Newcastle entrepreneur, was bought out of the Gateshead Metro shopping centre before it was built. He got £40m, but the Church kept losing money on the project until it was finally sold at a staggering loss in 1990. Sir ...”

“... If Robespierre could have read the second volume of John Ehrman’s massive biography of Pitt it would have saved him a good deal of worry. The two men had more in common than might appear at first sight, or than either of them would have cared to admit. Each was a decidedly cold fish, a bachelor of that alarming species that lives only for politics ...”

“... I go downstairs and through the gap in the wall I made, the Caledonian Gap, into my studio. It took me many years to be able to call the room I worked in a studio: the word seemed so pretentious for what was designed as the first-floor front bedroom. I do my post – about four letters a day – and phone calls, one every day to my confidant Martin ...”

“... was ‘always dirty and smelt’. This diary is also a love story: ‘The sun was shining and Alan took my hand.’ Eva Taylor considers her husband ‘cleverer than Macaulay’, whose works he reads to her, along with Gulliver’s Travels and The Diary of a Nobody. What A.J.P. Taylor needs, she says, is an intellectual woman ‘who adores him’. He has found ...”

“... this day, and it is a little strange to see it used in the title of the present book as though he took part in this war on the virtuous side. Yet such is the case. Robert Kidd appeared on the recorded scene in 1689 at the age of about 44, as one of the crew of a buccaneering ship in the West Indies. Buccaneering and piracy were often much the same ...”

“... endear him to the angry young men of the time. The Modernists, in the ascendant after his death, took their revenge. In no sense a Pioneer of Modern Design, Lutyens was pointedly ignored in Pevsner’s teleological tale, An Outline of European Architecture. ‘Our greatest architect since Wren’ was caricatured as ‘the greatest folly-builder England has ...”

“... who was then 73, was a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst once described by the New York Times as ‘John Wayne in a blue suit’. He taught at Columbia and had co-authored a book about the usefulness of the interview in clinical situations. Didion was 66. She wasn’t seeing MacKinnon under duress: her daughter, Quintana, who was an alcoholic, had told her own ...”

“... to place on record their sense of admiration for the dignity and courage displayed by Mr and Mrs John Profumo and their family in the quarter-century since the episode occurred. ‘This letter,’ they continued, ‘also records our feelings that it is now appropriate to consign the episode to history.’ It was an odd letter and I would be surprised if Lord ...”