“... and adventure. For years, in fact, he was thought of as a children’s writer. Henry James, an admirer of Kipling, complained: In his earliest time I thought he perhaps contained the seeds of an English Balzac; but I have quite given that up in proportion as he has come steadily from the less simple in subject to the more simple – from the ...”

“... It was​ in a Quonset hut south of the Potomac that Peter Matthiessen met James Jesus Angleton, ‘a cadaverous, hawk-boned man with dark hair, large elfin ears and a lively intelligent face behind horn-rimmed glasses’, as Matthiessen later described him in an unpublished account of his recruitment to the CIA in the autumn of 1950 ...”

“... don and college man with secrets and a principle of reserve – or with the peremptoriness of Edward Lear. Parker cites, as a grotesquerie, one of the earliest reviews of A Shropshire Lad by an American critic who decided it was all an elaborate joke, with Housman as the lachrymose Mock-Turtle (‘Bless you he haint got no sorrows. It’s only his ...”

“... David Howell, one of the back-room Tory ideas men tinkering obscurely with economic models while Edward Heath and Harold Wilson squared off against the unions in the 1960s and 1970s. (Howell was Thatcher’s first energy minister. He is now Baron Howell of Guildford, Foreign Office minister, still in government at the age of 76 under his fellow Etonian David ...”

“... and moderate? Master and slave? Dictator and compliant intellectual? (This was how C.L.R. James saw them in Mariners, Renegades and Castaways, written during his detention on Ellis Island in 1952 and republished last year.) Or are they merely chalk and cheese? Would the debates of the 1930s and 1940s, which cast Ahab as a Hitler or a Stalin and ...”

“... lifetime. According to Hugo Young, Thatcher had to be talked into Right to Buy by a desperate Edward Heath, then her leader, who’d been persuaded by his friend Pierre Trudeau after his electoral defeat in February 1974 that he needed a fistful of populist policies. No wonder Thatcher baulked. Right to Buy violated basic Thatcherite values: that ...”

“... abandoned the requirement that Friends observe ‘plainness of speech, behaviour and apparel’. Edward Fry accepted the previously unthinkable worldly honour of a knighthood. George Cadbury moved into a mansion with thirty servants. In the 1930s, when Rowntree scandalised the Cadburys and the Frys by trying to patent industrial processes – some Victorian ...”

“... of George III when trying to fit in another character who was larger than life, namely Charles James Fox. To have given him his proper due would have meant him taking over the play. And so it is with Humphrey Carpenter, my only excuse being that he would have been the first to understand this and to be unsentimental about it. When he turned up on the stage ...”

“... and papist, then the anti-papist but Catholic supreme head of the Church in England. His son Edward VI’s violently Catholic-burning Protestantism was replaced after his death while still a child by the violently Protestant-burning Catholicism of his half-sister Mary Tudor, who died childless (though married to the Spanish Catholic Philip II, some 30 ...”

“... and in another language; many émigrés or refugees or transplanted folk (‘homeloose’ in James Wood’s coinage) end up with a rusty, old-fashioned command of their language of origin and an imperfect mastery of the newly acquired tongue. There are a few exceptions, but it is more usual to have one language for the library and another for the bedroom ...”

“... In his 1986 article, ‘Moscow Folkways’, which Getty frequently cites, the Muscovite historian Edward Keenan drew attention to the persistence of ‘deep structures’ of Muscovite origin in Soviet political behaviour, irrespective of changing ideology and institutions. Stalin’s biographer Robert Tucker was keen on the resemblance between Stalin and the ...”

“... as it has been technically possible for it to access is widely accepted. In response to Edward Snowden’s leaks, the NSA put out a statement in August to expand on the public description of its mission, defining signals intelligence (or SIGINT) – its primary job – as ‘the production of foreign intelligence through the collection, processing ...”

“... Sedition Act of 1798, which prohibited citizens from criticising the government, his son James Lyon reprinted the biography, omitting the bits about the Deists and Socinians to let the prophet’s life story stand as a critique of the abuse of power and the suppression of dissent – with Adams as the latest in the long line of Muhammads. ‘We have ...”

“... to ‘speak … sing … fight and work’ for it. One of Tyndall’s fellow Queenwood teachers, Edward Frankland, had been invited to work with the chemist Robert Bunsen in Marburg, and in 1848 Tyndall decided to join him in Germany and study for a PhD, using his savings from railway surveying. In Marburg, he rose at 5 a.m., sitting in the cold in a ...”

“... she wanted to play the game in 1849 on a visit to Mansfield to meet the family of her new fiancé, James Collinson. By now, at the age of nineteen, her poems had been accepted in the national press, and after the despair that her father’s illness had cast on the whole household, she was enjoying again the audacious conversation and artistic ambition of the ...”