“... of the latest supplement to the Dictionary of National 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 ...”

“... charm. His freakish appearance drew attention, his conversation (dispensed in a ‘baby voice’) held it. He was assisted by a genius for attaching himself to people who could smooth the path to greater glory. This early success can’t, however, compare with the extravagant triumph of In Cold Blood and the consequent deluge of publicity. As Clarke puts ...”

“... of Liberals and Marxists alike, while the New Right delights in a pedigree which reaches back to David Hume and Adam Smith. In the United States scholars have established the influence of Francis Hutcheson, Hume and Smith on the American Revolution and the making of the Constitution. This view has been widely disseminated – to the liberal left by Garry ...”

“... Neo-Romantic illustrators, Keith Vaughan and John Minton excelled. Minton decorated Elizabeth David’s first book, A Book of Mediterranean Food with tipsy Breton sailors, market girls, lobster pots, fruits de mer, as a kind of delicious ballet in and out of the dedicated text. As Wright says, when you take up a book published by Lehmann you get the sense ...”

“... on an unprecedented scale is vividly illustrated in The Great Purges, which contains some of David King’s collection of contemporary photographs, together with a commentary by Isaac Deutscher: ‘In presenting these scenes, I had to reconstruct a nightmare.’ We must hope that, for a majority or Russians, their dreams have become pleasanter: but we do ...”

“... however apparently trivial’. For instance, there was the ritual of the cigarette-case: ‘It held, I suppose, ten cigarettes; but to see JB select one you might think that each had a separate and distinct personality. His hand would hover above the open case for an appreciable time before the choice was made, and the cigarette chosen was by no means ...”

“... CND, his contempt for the New English Bible, his delight in nude bathing, and his belief that if David Owen had stayed in the Labour Party he would have become its leader. All his columns were eagerly followed, but one series excited particular attention. He reported that his wife, the Hungarian historian Eva Haraszti, was in hospital, and chronicled the ...”

“... mother is said to have predicted, would be ‘a thorn in Charles’s side as long as he lives’. David Hume, encountering Fox at 16 during one of his formative visits to Paris, was startled by his intellectual power and maturity and already foresaw him as ‘a very great acquisition to the publick’, if the lure of a life of cosmopolitan ...”

“... account of himself starts with an illusion – that a boy born in 1838 possessed of his lineage held all the cards in life – and charts the unrelenting loss of certainty that followed. He was born in Boston, whose Puritan conscience and Unitarian rationalism had shaped the early years of the American republic, but which could not cope with its pre-Civil ...”

“... back alive. When the last Israeli troops withdrew in 2000 from the slice of territory they still held in south Lebanon, they stole away in the middle of the night, abandoning their local Christian allies to triumphant Hizbullah guerrillas. The gross underestimation of the ability of the Lebanese to defend themselves is the main theme of ...”

“... We know these to be facts because newspapers and electronic media have exposed them fearlessly. David Cameron, when he was prime minister, was so concerned about the situation that he appointed the veteran Tory politician and entrepreneur Lord Young to report on the state of health and safety legislation and ‘the rise of the compensation culture over the ...”

“... it inspired a rich store of legends about his astonishing feats of magic. As the medievalist David Collins asked, is it Magnus or Magus, Albert the Great or Albert the Magician? Irven Resnick and Kenneth Kitchell, who have long toiled on the Albertian corpus, provide a lively, accessible introduction to his life and thought. Albert joined the Dominican ...”

“... The fifth annual Battle of Ideas was held over a weekend last October at the Royal College of Art in West London. There was a route you could do, a circuit, up the stairs at one end of the windowless basement and down them again at the other, and I did it many times, bag dragging at my back. Each day was divided into five time-slots, each slot into ‘strands’: the Battle for Energy, Battle for Work, Battle for Reproductive Choice; or Breakfast Banter, Café Controversies, Bookshop Barnie ...”

“... dominant American politician without a shadow of rivalry. If the next presidential election were held today, he would be the Republican nominee and he would probably win. A Gallup poll on 18 June showed him at 45 per cent approval; this dropped a notch or two after the Helsinki debacle; but Rasmussen (a more accurate predictor of the 2016 election) now has ...”

“... responded as he always did, by raising the stakes. He lobbied Congress. He revived a long-held plan to buy the Tour de France – not to bribe the authorities, but actually to purchase the whole damn thing – so that he could run the race his way (he needed to raise $1.5 billion, a figure that eventually proved beyond even him). He hired the best ...”