“... best-seller, publishing 18 volumes of ‘true crime stories’. The first head of the FBI, William Flynn, edited a popular crime magazine, Flynn’s Weekly. His successor, William Burns, was a national celebrity and the subject of countless feature articles. Like Flynn, Burns was an affable, extrovert Irish cop – a ...”

“... the search for Franklin began, and 1859, when M’Clintock discovered some grisly remains on King William Island, almost thirty naval and overland expeditions joined the search. A writer has to juggle the names of explorers, famous in their day, but now known only to Arctic buffs, such as John and James Clark ...”

“... from the single-issue elections of the last twenty years. Carter has refused to debate Edward Kennedy, and now John Anderson, and thus Reagan. Reagan in turn has been bound and gagged by his advisers, their hostage rather than their boss, in the apparent belief that he cannot live up to the media pitches devised by them on his behalf. There has ...”

“... judicial legacy. The retirement of Chief Justice Burger created the opportunity: Reagan promoted William Rehnquist to the chief justiceship, selecting Antonin Scalia as his replacement on the bench. Senate Democrats reacted sharply, but aimed their fire at the wrong target: in trying, and failing, to deprive Rehnquist of his (symbolic) promotion, they gave ...”

“... to terrorise, absolute terror terrorises absolutely. Th-th-that’s all, folks!’ The narrator, William Cowling, fails to become a terrorist, since he is too frightened, but his girlfriend, Sarah Strouch, passes the test and, by 1980, she is saying: ‘Terrorism is a state of mind, but nobody gets terrified anymore.’ Some two hundred pages later, she is ...”

“... families of the Holy Roman Empire, before becoming an Irish MP, a baron, and the confidant of William Gladstone. Possessing social credentials of this kind helped to make these men the historians they were. They did not only write about power: they also directly experienced it. They not only visited the archives and libraries of the great: they were ...”

“... solid Southern bloc to rely on, he reached out to Northern liberals like Hubert Humphrey and Jack Kennedy, pointing out that only by sticking together could the Democrats weather Eisenhower’s huge popularity. With Taft’s supporters wanting to lead the Republicans way to the right, the Democrats might even make themselves the core of a moderate ruling ...”

“... before Traubel began recording their conversations, for example, Whitman wrote to an admirer named William Sloan Kennedy, who once worked on the editorial board of the Saturday Evening Post, that ‘it is of no importance whether I read Emerson before starting L of G. It just happens to be that I had not. If I were to ...”

“... up? Every frame of the video sequence was pored over, as if it were the Zapruder footage of the Kennedy assassination.Thanks largely to the spread of smart scrollable devices in the last fifteen years, a certain concept of public participation – what is now known in the managerial vernacular as ‘engagement’ – is common to events of this sort, and to ...”

“... although the trouble between Welles and Hull sucks in many other foreign policy characters (like William Bullitt, with whom Roosevelt broke over the Welles exposé), it has little political consequence. Welles was closer to the liberal New Dealers, Hull to the traditional Democratic Party, and those demanding action against the extermination of European ...”

“... occur, but schoolmasters and headmasters abound: not just raffish Etonian schoolmasters such as William Cory Johnson and Oscar Browning, but solid, sober headmasters in the High Victorian style, such as Montagu Butler and J.E.C. Welldon at Harrow, afforced by Kennedy at Shrewsbury, Farrar at Marlborough, and Young at ...”

“... the West was full of enablers and apologists. Hitler’s American admirers included Henry Ford, William Randolph Hearst and Charles Lindbergh. General Motors, DuPont and IBM did business with the Nazis. So did MGM. It’s no shock to see democratic politicians cosying up to Saudi autocrats, or Rupert Murdoch or the Walt Disney Company ingratiating ...”

“... workers could extract and prepare for shipping more than twelve thousand tons of coal.In 1938, William Earl Turner moved to Lynch and was assigned a bed in one of the company boarding houses for single miners. Turner had been working in and around Central Appalachia since he left school, aged twelve, nine years earlier. Within a year of arriving in Lynch ...”

“... Live Line, and supported the vehement Protestants who opposed the election of the Catholic Kennedy. The Bushes have never liked the Kennedys either, because they were Catholics – although the Walkers had been too – and because they were wealthy. ‘They never had to work,’ the second President Bush said of the Kennedys in 1989. ‘They never had ...”

“... In 1960, Kirk Douglas revealed that Trumbo had written the screenplay for Spartacus; President Kennedy crossed the thinning picket lines of Catholic War Veterans to watch the film in a cinema in Washington DC. The blacklist, at least in principle, was broken. So Trumbo entered Hollywood legend as ‘The Man who Broke the Blacklist’. As Pauline Kael put ...”