“... He then rejoined in 1954, in protest at the conviction of Party leaders under the draconian Smith Act – before leaving for a second time when the convictions were reversed. In his later accounts he suggests that the HUAC affair didn’t have ‘anything at all to do with the Communist Party’, that it was really about ‘the USA and its traditions ...”

“... to convey his condemnation of Charles’s beheading. For the Royalists, Muhammad was Cromwell; John Milton and other Parliamentarians responded by equating Charles with the prophet. Those who idolised the king as a martyr had ‘stolen the pattern from Mecha’, Milton wrote. Muhammad had been an all-purpose heresiarch, but now he devolved in the European ...”

“... never did, to work his critical observations up into a coherent theory; others, like Grover Smith, read what he had read, so far as this could be ascertained, and examined his sources with what looked like, but cannot quite have been, exhaustive care: for recently there has been a boom in such research. A procession of students combs the archives in New ...”

“... Shrew was about. My co-star in the Shakespeare and who played Beecham in The Chiltern Hundreds was John Scaife, a friend whom I lost sight of after university and only this last year discovered had become a distinguished molecular biologist at Edinburgh, but died young (in the 1990s) from Aids.17 January. Rupert returns from a walk with Owen, his brother, and ...”

“... According to John Cheever, 1948 was ‘the year everybody in the United States was worried about homosexuality’. And nobody was more worried than the federal government, which was rumoured to be teeming with gays and lesbians. One might think that Washington’s attentions would have been focused elsewhere – on the Soviet Union, for example, or on Communist spies – but in 1950, President Truman’s advisers warned him that ‘the country is more concerned about the charges of homosexuals in the government than about Communists ...”

“... is usually true, nor do the proponents of such ideas fall into predictable political camps. Joan Smith, quoted by Watt, blows John Berger’s famous dictum that ‘men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at’ smartly out of the water as just another male fantasy. If they are interested in clothes, women ...”

“... So do party differences, and not just in matters of policy. Allison Brown, a student of mine at Smith College, discovered that Republican and Democratic acceptance speeches of the Sixties and Seventies took different approaches to ‘sovereignty’. Republicans stressed the ultimate authority of God, which they implicitly separated from the authority of the ...”

“... later circulated about her well-publicised weakness for male attendants like the Scottish gillie, John Brown, the Queen did not always adhere to this message. While Victoria may surely be forgiven for relaxing her grasp on the marble Albert, her refusal to moderate her attentions to Brown suggests that in this respect, anyway, she had not altogether mastered ...”

“... disappointingly, to be just a desire to have even more money. Buchan offers a fascinated sketch of John Law, who for five hundred days or so ‘ruled France more completely than its absolute monarchs’. During this period, in the early 18th century, he controlled the country’s foreign trade and its national debt, as well as about half of what is now the ...”

“... at the most straightforward level of weighing and measuring. It was an indication of the antiquary John Aubrey’s remarkably curious mind that he wanted to find out his height and weight. His careful accounts of weigh-ins take note of what he was wearing, whether he was carrying a sword and what he had in his pockets. When it came to his height, however, he ...”

“... peak of the genre, Waterstone’s introduced a new section labelled ‘Painful Lives’ and W.H. Smith offered the category ‘Tragic Life Stories’. The passion for true-life unhappiness was partly responsible for fiction being seen as concealed autobiography. When I wrote a novel in 1989 narrated by an infant without a brain telling the story of its ...”

“... him in the 1750s. So too, in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, agnostic clerics such as John Robinson, the author of Honest to God, David Jenkins, the controversial bishop of Durham, the Scots Episcopalian bishop of Edinburgh, Richard Holloway, and the Anglican atheist Don Cupitt belong more convincingly in liberal ranks than with authentic enemies ...”

“... of us outgrow too well; the madness of adolescence, ‘just a face we are going through’, as John Lennon once said; the madness of love, where the only sanity would be a proper respect for our folly and an attempt not to do harm; autism; schizophrenia; depression; and our failure to find any sanity in our hunger for money (‘money gives people an ...”

“... According to Henry James, reviewing John Cross’s life of George Eliot, the creations which brought her renown were of the incalculable kind, shaped themselves in mystery, in some intellectual back-shop or secret crucible, and were as little as possible implied in the aspect of her life. There is nothing more singular or striking in Mr Cross’s volumes than the absence of any indication, up to the time the Scenes of Clerical Life were published, that Miss Evans was a likely person to have written them; unless it be the absence of any indication, after they were published, that the deeply studious, concentrated, home-keeping Mrs Lewes was a likely person to have produced their successors ...”

“... who can be relied on to take the most permissive position of anyone in the room.’ Wesley Smith, author of The Culture of Death, offers a more sinister vision of the ethics business, depicting bioethicists as a self-appointed corps of elite liberals plotting to take control of the American medical and judicial systems. Critical essays and editorials ...”