“... after service, pull on his thumbs and brag about National Socialism.’ Wodehouse revised by James Lees-Milne. Fear of the mob; order and chaos. As with the world so with fiction: elephantine narratives, multiple versions running away from each other, stories begetting stories. How to keep it under control? ‘I’m talking about, I don’t know, about ...”

“... came to seem a mixed blessing, more fundamentally, for the reason set out so ringingly by Edward Gibbon: ‘The decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness ... the stupendous fabric yielded to the pressure of its own weight.’ The problem of how these new European empires were to avoid the fate of their Roman ...”

“... rumour at Louth in October 1536 were duly enforced in the reigns of Henry VIII’s children Edward and Elizabeth. So much for the events. But it is the interpretation of the events which has generated a small shelf’s worth of books and articles on the subject of the Pilgrimage of Grace, of which Hoyle’s is only the latest, if the most ...”

“... from within the consulting room. There is a story, though, from his years of fame, that when Edward Kennedy came over from Hyannisport to consult him about running for President, Erikson asked him to think about what kind of old age he wanted. He had at first been doubtful about the whole psychoanalytical milieu, so ‘intensely verbal’ as he described ...”

“... variously at about 50 per cent (1998) and 84 per cent (1999). Lord Callaghan, Lady Thatcher, Sir Edward Heath, John Major and Cardinal Winning all met the Commissioners. So did the editors of the Times and the Guardian, Lord Habgood, Lord Howe, the Duke of Buccleuch (the only duke to surface), Professors Scruton and Bogdanor, as well as spokesmen for Ubley ...”

“... and it goes places and it will never, I promise you, get stuck in the mud’) and reveals that Edward Heath was probably the first leader of his party to have fitted carpets. White Heat contains a comprehensive collection of George Brown stories, although the best one remains the incident when the worse-for-wear foreign secretary was rejected by a ...”

“... the travelling roadshow organised by Shaftesbury and Buckingham around the King’s bastard son, James, Duke of Monmouth, was playing to rapturous crowds. Activists among the country gentry, incensed by the long prorogation of Parliament in 1675, and by then convinced that Charles II would never accept Parliament as a partner in government, had for some ...”

“... Mount Vesuvius … lodging among the scenery’ left the Royalty Theatre ‘totally destroyed’.Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s novel The Last Days of Pompeii, published in 1834 and inevitably later dramatised, marked something of a departure. It spoke with the condescension of posterity that would characterise, in Britain at least, the later 19th century’s view ...”

“... with a comprehensive collection of rhino whips.’Each to their own. Or each to their own story. James Birch tells of Vicky de Lambray, ‘a transgender prostitute, who claimed to have given every member of the royal family a blowjob’. George Melly or David Sylvester, good listeners and both regulars, might have tuned in a bit more carefully and given us ...”

“... and Sure Hope – with brandishing the torch of faith against the established church.Hopes that James I, who succeeded Elizabeth in 1603, would cut puritans some slack were dashed by the instituting of new church canons. Some protested and were suspended; most capitulated. A brave few took a stand. In 1612 ...”

“... in the Daily Mail and Robert Nye in Tribune, and described as a ‘very, very, very bad book’ by Edward Lucie-Smith on the BBC Home Service.‘The trouble with both Pritchett and Wyndham was, I feel, a sort of temperamental incompatibility,’ Monteith reassured Golding. ‘It just wasn’t their sort of book – and it was a bit silly, I think, of the two ...”

“... celebrated Hemingway, Steinbeck, Dos Passos, Richard Wright, Erskine Caldwell, Dashiel Hammett and James M. Cain, Beauvoir was told, when the United States had its own sophisticated tradition of internal, psychological exploration; she was witnessing the formation of the American Studies canon – Hawthorne, Melville, Thoreau, Henry ...”

“... Heaney didn’t feature in the first version of Peregrine Prykke’s Pilgrimage (1974), Clive James’s satire on British literary life; but in the ‘improved version’, just two years later, he has become a fixture of the scene, ‘SEAMUS FEAMUS’, pictured tucking into a pub lunch of ‘two slabs of peat around a conger eel’ (‘Clive was very ...”

“... Hamlet marks the point of transition to the new dynamics of the reign of James. As the Prince increasingly uses the terms employed by artisans and the lower orders, he seems to commit himself to a language learned from the politically voiceless, and thus to become their mouthpiece. To the Court this signifies madness.Madness of a ...”

“... content. He was not the only actor of his age to have developed a ‘great melody’ – Edward Gibbon was another – but he has to be known in this way, and Dr O’Brien has set out to depict the ‘great melody’ as formed by what he was and by the grand issues – the themes to which the subtitle alludes – to which he gave himself. This is not ...”