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“... Profiles in Courage, but that book did include some men by no means universally admired: George Norris, who attacked the Wilson administration’s infringement of neutrality during the Great War, or Robert Taft, who criticised the Nuremberg Trials as retroactive justice. In Brown’s book, there isn’t a page that anyone would find controversial or ...”

“... Thank you for keeping still,’ Elizabeth Taylor says to Paul Newman at the end of the movie version of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958). Taylor’s character is thanking Newman for not saying anything when he hears her lying about being pregnant. But ‘Thank you for keeping still’ is also a good summary of Newman’s acting style, especially in his early films, when the main thing required of him was that he display his magnificent torso and his dazzling blue eyes for the audience to drink in their full manly beauty ...”

“... Parsons, the brickmaker whose wife, Mary, had been fined for accusing Marshfield. In February 1651 George Langton, a carpenter, declined to sell hay to Parsons because he had none to spare. Parsons took this badly and occult revenge was suspected when, some days later, Langton’s wife, Hannah, pulled her bag pudding of offal and oats out of the kettle only to ...”

“... a BBC producer (she worked on the first Woman’s Hour), later a freelance journalist; his father, George Ellidge, an industrial psychologist whose life and earnings were greatly reduced by MS and confinement in a wheelchair (‘It is very odd, isn’t it?’ Wyatt remarks to O’Dair). They were an open, interested, bohemian couple, Fabian socialists with ...”

“... Richardson, like most of his ilk, was naturally right-wing, and having been introduced to George Winter, ex-burglar, crime reporter and BOSS spy, and, more important, to Winter’s wife, Richardson was an obvious recruit for dirty tricks in London. He also plainly believed that his work for BOSS would provide him with favoured treatment from the South ...”

“... left numerous fragments of autobiography, including a letter about himself to his publisher, John Taylor, in 1821, given in Robinson’s book, and a memoir about his four-day walk home from an asylum in Essex in 1841, which both Tibble and Robinson include. But subjective writings make only a part of Clare’s efforts to record his village environment. He was ...”

“... has Mrs Huxley been described, with this book in mind, as a ‘cross between Miss Marple and George Smiley’. She engineers a conclusion in which the Royal Personage only just, by a fortunate accident, escapes the toils of an expensively planned kidnapping plot. But the real beneficiaries of the action are a pair of innocent badgers, threatened with ...”

“... rockers joining him on the Vote for Change tour of battleground states include R.E.M., James Taylor and Jackson Browne, with the Dixie Chicks – whose lead singer, Natalie Maines, got into trouble for saying that they were ashamed of George W. Bush’s Texas connections, though she later apologised for the remark ...”

“... whose script, though closer to what he was after, still didn’t satisfy him; and finally Samuel Taylor, recommended because he came from San Francisco, where Hitchcock had decided the film should be set. It was Taylor who proposed giving away the solution to the mystery halfway through the film. This spilling of beans ...”

“... by state coercion, whether through the enforcement of contracts or at the point of a bayonet. George Hourani, a historian of Arab seafaring, has written about the ‘lengthy stops in the hot, humid ports’ that merchants had to endure ‘at the mercy of the local ruler’, protected from the threat of piracy only ‘in the rare waters where a ruler kept ...”

“... In the final year of the last century, George Stephanopoulos, Bill Clinton’s one-time aide and press secretary, published a memoir of his time in the White House entitled All Too Human: A Political Education. Back then, it seemed like a terribly exciting book: 1999 was the year of Clinton’s Senate trial, following his impeachment, and also of the first appearance on US television of The West Wing, which offered the fantasy of a different kind of liberal president ...”

“... said, ‘I have the feeling of the conclusion of the age of the prophets.’The pianist Cecil Taylor performed an elegy of shimmering delicacy,1 punctuated by hints of an impending storm. Ravi Coltrane, John Coltrane’s son, gave a stately reading on soprano saxophone of Coleman’s 1959 composition ‘Peace’, with Geri Allen on piano. The tenor ...”

“... Marxist and Fascist readings have tugged at it repeatedly. Both Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley and George Eliot’s Felix Holt have processed it for their own purposes. The play seems always to have functioned as a kind of arena. However, Patterson’s concern to establish what the ‘text of Coriolanus itself’ has to say presumes to stand aside from all ...”

“... in the water.Given Johnson’s rough and ready way with people, a complicated figure like A.J.P. Taylor detains him for longer than you’d expect. At Oxford Johnson knew and admired him; he envied his prolific output; he liked him – not the same as admiration – and also definitely didn’t. In the end, Taylor emerges ...”

“... Dostoevsky. As a cleric of the established Church, I am ranking high. St Augustine, Bede, Jeremy Taylor, Parson Woodforde and Kierkegaard get only one mention each (and strictly speaking, the gloomy Dane was a frondeur on the fringes of establishment piety and ought not to count). Bossuet, Bunyan and George Herbert equal ...”