“... The moment of revelation is a little different for every person who experiences it. For Sam Walton, founder of Wal-Mart, the road to Damascus came in the form of a pair of knickers. At the time – 1945 – Walton was in his late twenties, and was running a small department store in Newport, Arkansas belonging to a franchise called Ben Franklin ...”

“... greatest poetic rivals), noticing some of the telling details that catch us off guard: Three little girls with broken shoes And hard sharp coughs, Three little girls who sold us sweets Too near the shells, Three little girls with names of saints And angels’ eyes …In a letter to ...”

“... Of these recent decades, the 1970s is the most reviled. I once had a colleague who’d been a little girl in the 1970s, and not a particularly poor one, yet she would shudder and say: ‘Oh, it was like Eastern Europe then, all stews and root vegetables and wet holidays in caravans.’ Her austere picture didn’t fit with my own memories, which are of ...”

“... more intently introductory than anything else he has written in a long and distinguished career. A Little History of Poetry canters from Gilgamesh and Homer to Mary Oliver and Les Murray in three hundred pages with a breezy sense of mission, assuming in the reader no previous acquaintance with the subject (‘Confessional poetry is poetry that reveals personal ...”

“... came out in the end, but does it always do so? No one knows to this day about the murder of the little princes in the tower, although Tudor propaganda inclines us now to think that it was Henry VII and not Richard III who did them in. Shakespeare’s efforts are just as counter-productive here as any claim by the ministry of lies. In that context one of the ...”

“... generalisations are underscored by a number of errors. Westerns attributes Martin Ritt’s Hud to Arthur Penn and the well-publicised love of ‘Home on the Range’ to Theodore Roosevelt rather than Franklin; it imagines that cameras possessed zoom lenses in 1939 and that the blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo’s defiance before Congress consisted in ...”

“... fringes of politics an unelected dilettante makes a President; his wife destroys his successor. Arthur Schlesinger has described Philip Graham as one of the more brilliant and tragic figures of his generation, a man of extraordinary vitality, audacity and charm, who was fascinated by power and men who possessed it. Graham was close to Lyndon Johnson, was ...”

“... made no more sense than it makes for 20th-century New Yorkers to hanker after being ruled by King Arthur and his knights. Stone’s history is a good deal like Mark Twain’s, and hardly the worse for it either. Still, historical, textual, and interpretative questions will creep in. Did Socrates hanker after a return to aristocratic or monarchical ...”

“... and out of love’, which did not require physical requital in her case, she later insisted to Arthur Balfour that ‘I was no man’s mistress and never had a lover in my life.’ Margot and her beloved sister, Laura, conspired that they would both marry young, especially after a gypsy fortune-teller had proffered assurances that Margot was destined to be ...”

“... serviceable but perfunctory and poorly-written ‘quickie’ with no clear view of its subject and little understanding of the politics of the Labour Party. Robert Harris’s is longer, fuller and excellently researched: among the sources he has been able to see and uses very well are the GMC minutes of the Bedwellty Constituency Labour Party; he is thoroughly ...”

“... not being entirely in possession of his means, in a kind of writing relatively new to him, does little to lessen the worth of his living gratitude. Since he is what used to be called a good hater and a bonny fighter (‘I am happy in my glittering envelope, and will fight those who would puncture it,’ ‘I am not prepared to give up my inheritance without ...”

“... industry and enthusiasm evoke admiration, but perhaps a general reader needs something a little lighter, more sceptical, more historically-orientated. No such problems arise with Mr Fowles’s short and elegant essay on Stonehenge, which is part history and archaeology, part literary exercise and part moral philosophy. Mr Fowles seems to have been ...”

“... stood in the way of an American version.) According to Suchoff, Finkielkraut is no Allan Bloom or Arthur Schlesinger: ‘far from a neoconservative’, he is, rather, a pluralist in the vein of Henry Louis Gates, and his reflections on the differences between the terms ‘Israelite’ and ‘Jew’ find an echo in the American opposition between ...”

“... home, where I was angry with my wife for her things lying about, and in my passion kicked the little fine Baskett which I bought her in Holland and broke it, which troubled me after I had done it. Within all the afternoon, setting up shelfes in my study. At night to bed.’ And there it was, a day in the life of a young man on the ...”

“... Ataturk’s Turkey and in some ways anticipated Suez, the leader of the Canadian Opposition, Arthur Meighen, had said that Canada’s attitude should be summed up in the words; ‘Ready, aye ready.’ Australia under Menzies did not fit entirely into that pattern. The book’s one weakness is that its author clearly did not have the chance to visit the ...”