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“... When Sir Lewis Namier was lying on his death-bed, he is said to have looked up radiantly at his wife and declared: ‘What a pity! Yesterday was the first time I saw in my mind’s eye the Survey of Parliament as a whole.’ A pity indeed, for the insight allegedly offered to Namier on the point of death has never quite been afforded to any of his disciples and successors ...”

“... Press Secretary, must rank as the source closest to Mrs Thatcher. ‘I only wish,’ he has said, ‘I was as sophisticated, as devilishly clever and Machiavellian as some make out. Not even a combination of Einstein backed by the world’s most advanced computer could achieve the presentational coups with which we – indeed I – have been ...”

“... or four million people watched a ticker-tape parade. ‘Colonel Lindbergh, the city is yours,’ said the mayor. Lindbergh was 25. Two years later he married Anne Morrow, and on 1 March 1932 their son Charles Augustus junior was kidnapped from their home near Hopewell, New Jersey. Three months after that, the baby was found murdered in nearby woods. In early ...”

“... sold; auditions held for poetry readings; invitations sent out. The result was a grand gathering. Edward de Souza read some of Shelley’s political poems with tremendous force. The winner of the audition to read ‘Men of England’ was a young black woman. Lesley Saunders, a Greenham Common campaigner and local Labour Party member, read some of her ...”

“... he couldn’t do much except lie down below deck, unresponsive and helpless. After three months he said ‘he wanted to come home,’ and his wife, Laura, came to fetch him back to Norfolk. Back near Blakeney he was sometimes well enough to go out on still water in a dinghy, or sit in the sun carving toy boats, but he was often marooned indoors, too unwell to ...”

“... became fixated on a golden-haired British gossip columnist called Sheilah Graham, who had, he said, the look of ‘a young Zelda’. The creator of Jay Gatsby wasn’t slow to see through her persona. Sheilah Graham was actually Lily Shiel, the youngest child of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants, who had grown up in a Stepney Green slum. Fitzgerald took it on ...”

“... For after all, the inspiring motive for two of the other finest combatant poets of the Great War, Edward Thomas and Ivor Gurney, was patriotism. One could, if one wished, even make Edward Thomas out to be a jingoist, for did he not write: But with the best and meanest Englishmen I am one in crying, God save England, lest ...”

“... Scotland’s languages, sometimes improved by collision with English. Probably he meant it when he said that, if there had to be an international language, it should be Italian. While one great hero was certainly MacDiarmid, whose ‘A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle’ he’d carried with him all through the war, another was Gramsci, introduced to him by ...”

“... later told a similar story. A Protestant pastor who knew Ivan’s Russia but who wasn’t there said that Ivan’s men raped the women and, when they resisted, the tsar had them beaten, had their nails and tongues torn out, then impaled them on red-hot stakes. Jerome Horsey, an Englishman who knew Ivan and was familiar with his world, but of whose colourful ...”

“... more to talk about. Nevertheless, it is encouraging to find a volume as solid and responsible as Edward Peters’s Torture, which traces the history of torture from the extraction of evidence from slave witnesses in criminal trials to the Inquisition, and on to its use, after a brief interruption, in our century as part of the ideological wars of ...”

“... no less, entitled A Guest of Honour. Even today, it has the air of a massive cultural oxymoron. Edward Berlin speculates that the libretto may celebrate Theodore Roosevelt’s politically dangerous invitation to a black man – the celebrated educationalist, Booker T. Washington – to dine at the White House. Styled a ‘ragtime opera’, A Guest of Honour ...”

“... of that era, to figure occasionally in fairy tales such as Attenborough’s Gandhi. E.J., or Edward, Thompson, seldom remembered these days, and always uneasy in his role as ‘friend of India’, was, on the other hand, involved with the country of his long domicile (from 1910-23) in a way that was often uncomfortable but always intimate; he reappears ...”

“... but page 503 makes it clear that initially it was (although the author might, have added that ‘Edward Bancroft, the American diplomat’ suggested by Lafayette for preliminary reconaissance, was also Edward ‘Edwards’ the English spy, which may have had something to do with the failure to hit the target). But the real ...”

“... repetitions, threats, jokes and diversions, and his addiction to the ‘what I should have said’ school of retrospect, all contribute to a portrait of a mind that is not in control of its experience. The novel does not merely display the dark creatures of McLeish’s imagination, but follows his progress in taming them. A significant stage in his ...”

“... was born in Croydon, to a maritime family (he shared this background with his distant admirer Edward Carpenter). His early years were given over to colonial journeyings that left him self-conscious and unhappy: there were two voyages to Australia, on the second of which, in 1875, he got his first job, as a minor teacher in somewhere called Sparkes ...”