“... up in her flat, Wi both ends on a clawammer, Split-splat, split-splat, split-splat. But Jayne MacDonald were a shopgirl Sellin nobbut shoes. Pete, e killed er anyway An now e were front page noos. They appointed a Special Detective, George Oldfield e were called. E looked like a ...”

“... cabinet minister cannot risk the Government’s authority being made unsustainable. Lloyd George was perhaps the consummate practitioner of the pragmatic art of switching from sticks to carrots and back again. But Thatcher gave in to the mineworkers in 1982 before facing them down in 1984, just as Baldwin gave in to them in 1925 before facing them ...”

“... vision of upholstered modern life, as well as the tastes of its royal owners, Queen Mary and King George V. There was a working toilet made by John Bolding and Sons, and a gun room stocked with Purdey shotguns powerful enough to shoot flies. Artists created hundreds of paintings and books for its clubby, masculine library. Harold Nicolson gamely contributed a ...”

“... George Moore, ‘daring’ novelist and absentee landlord, sage and humbug of Ebury Street, seemed born to be insulted. ‘An over-ripe gooseberry, a great big intoxicated baby, a satyr, a boiled ghost, a gosling’ – these were among the Dublin epithets collected by his fellow writer Susan Mitchell and here passed on by Tony Gray ...”

“... of England and the old Empire to talk freely to mad old Indians. Change involved the right of George Bernard Shaw to say that the long lying-in-state of the dead queen was a danger to public health, and for the slow emergence of figures such as D.H. Lawrence and E.M. Forster, who would dramatise in novels the end of restriction and the beginning of new ...”

“... Mary-Kay will confirm’. Oh well. I’m reminded of a lecture by the eminent Harvard sociologist George Homans whose peroration, delivered in a ringing Bostonian fortissimo, was that ‘the really nasty thing about these investigations is that some people are liked by people they do not themselves like!’ 15 June. Talk with Stephen Graubard, editor of the ...”

“... values’, the ‘good’ (or the ‘bad’) old days, the Dunkirk spirit, the ghost of Ramsay MacDonald – in all such sloganising, the ghosts of the past are conjured up to clinch arguments about the present. And in no field, paradoxically, is this ancestral magic so pervasive as in science – above all, in myth-making introductions to scientific ...”

“... victories, are themselves uncertain about how to end it. What will there be to pick up when George Bush leaves office in two years’ time? If he lasts that long.Conclusions and opinions aren’t Woodward’s strongest suit. He offers no general summations to his three books, no views on the people he interviews. He allows his subjects to speak for ...”

“... utter determination to hit the big time. ‘I was ambitious in my head,’ his schoolfriend George Underwood told Trynka, ‘but not like he was.’ On that ‘sunny evening’ in July 1972, Trynka recalls: His look is lascivious, amused. As an audience of excited teens and outraged parents struggle to take in the multicoloured quilted jumpsuit, the ...”

“... Prebble’s that all these tartans were nothing but hype: a stunt devised chiefly by Scott to make George IV’s visit to Edinburgh in August 1822 as splendiferous as possible. In his anonymous shilling pamphlet ‘HINTS addressed to the INHABITANTS OF EDINBURGH AND OTHERS in prospect of HIS MAJESTY’S VISIT by an Old Citizen’, Scott dubbed a principal ...”

“... cut in relief. Mackintosh was an artist as well as an architect. With his future wife, Margaret Macdonald, her sister Frances and her future husband, Herbert McNair, he was one of ‘The Four’, responsible for paintings of attenuated female figures with intense faces, and stylised curvilinear decorative swirls. To their critics, their work was the ...”

“... Hanks ought to allow, he’s not Alec Guinness. And what about Intolerable Cruelty (2003), with George Clooney and Catherine Zeta-Jones, which doesn’t look like a Coen Brothers movie because it doesn’t look as if it was directed by anybody? Still, they can’t be after a single perfect film, since their best work falls into such distinct modes: quirky ...”

“... We have one more thing: the most nerve-straining title of all and the one discussed long ago by George Steiner in his Trotsky and the Tragic Imagination. Isaac Deutscher, the non-Jewish Jew par excellence, hesitated in calling his Trotsky trilogy The Prophet. There are messianic traditions after all, and there are messianic traditions. Yet surely Irving ...”

“... other poets’; and the publishers, who ‘all speak, none harkens.’ She was, according to Kate Macdonald’s introduction to this edition, ‘a natural champion of 1920s middlebrow culture’, but the book is also veined with her scholarly preoccupations. She had a passion for words and especially for logomachy. She liked to invent new terms to see if they ...”

“... by excluding dissent. Enrolling at the University of Pennsylvania in 1945, he read Dwight Macdonald’s essay ‘The Responsibility of Peoples’. Macdonald asked why, if the German people were to be held responsible for Nazi atrocities, the American people were not thought responsible for the saturation bombing of ...”