“... truth was that Griffith was the embodiment of that magnificent new art: he was to cinema what Henry Ford was to industrial production. Griffith introduced narrative suspense and emotional identification to the movies. He began making two-reel films in 1907, and after turning out hundreds of them he had learned how to use editing to create dramatic ...”

“... thereof to the next heir of the crown’ – effectively Arran. Cecil’s acceptance of the power of parliament to depose a monarch resurfaced in the (English) Treason Act of 1571, which would have barred Mary from the succession if she had been found guilty of conspiring against Elizabeth. Mary, however, simply refused to accept that parliament (or any ...”

“... fifteen thousand of whose letters survive, has been cut down to a few hundred. Even Shaw and Henry James were reduced to four admittedly vast volumes apiece, a very small proportion of what is extant. Leonard Woolf, of whose letters eight thousand were available, has had to be shrunk to this one sizeable volume of about six hundred. His editor naturally ...”

“... repressed female fury by maiming and blinding the aristocratic Rochester, but thereby reverses the power-relation between him and the petty-bourgeois Jane and clears the path for a fulfilling relationship between them. (It has, of course, first toppled mad Bertha Rochester conveniently off the rooftop, thus removing another awkward obstacle to their ...”

“... the usual level of a Cockney actress’s memoirs to achieve such vivaciousness, such metaphorical power, such surprisingly literary turns of style? Ask a silly question, get a silly answer. Dora has an explanation for it all. Her book would never have been written without the sisters’ fabulous journey to prewar Hollywood, the modern enchanted forest, to ...”

“... that she sees between the strict monotheism of the orthodox and the monarchical bishop whose power at this period she tends to exaggerate. But the contrast with some at least of the Gnostics is clear enough: for them, the Supreme Being was distinct from the inferior if not malevolent creator god or Demiurge, the God of the Old Testament, and true gnosis ...”

“... to have been respectable. Nor does one necessarily share the author’s complacency about ‘the power Disraeli had over the Cabinet and Queen Victoria, and the global power of the Rothschilds in the world of finance’. And can one be entirely reassured by the sentence: ‘As usual, however, unity of family feeling ...”

“... disavowed racism will re-emerge? – was proved wrong. One of the interesting things about Henry Kissinger, the ultimate cynical Realpolitiker, is how utterly wrong most of his predictions were. When news reached the West of the 1991 anti-Gorbachev military coup, for example, Kissinger immediately accepted the new regime as a fact. It collapsed ...”

“... we cannot be pressured, impressed, bribed or bought . . . Perhaps because the US is a great power, it feels it can do what it wants and what is good for it. It seems to be saying that there are two laws, two sets of rules and two kinds of logic, one for the US and one for other countries. Perhaps it is idealistic of me, but I never accepted the ...”

“... though scholarly opinion has since rowed back, seeing them as more interested in personal power than state-building. Even so, the archaeologist Max Adams argues that England might have formed around a dominant Mercia, had other factors not intervened. Charlemagne’s letter to Offa, written in 796, addressed him as merely ‘king of the ...”

“... September, rumours were rife in Conservative circles that he was not proving very good at the job. Henry Fairlie, for instance, was writing in the Spectator that ‘there is no point in concealing the fact that his first six months in office have not been encouraging.’ More and more criticisms were being made – ‘by those who know’ – of Eden’s ...”

“... Evelyn Waugh (temporarily: the ghost of Tyndale got the better of him), of a bird sanctuary and a power station. Then it was most famous for the cloth trade, which gave Tyndale plenty of support during his life. He went to Oxford, where he discovered Erasmus, and perhaps to Cambridge as well. Around 1523 he left Gloucestershire for London, and tried to ...”

“... that the Army had cut Charles down to size, but terrified of the new and efficient military power they had created. They demanded that the Army be disbanded, or, better still, packed off to slaughter Catholics in Ireland. What they overlooked was that the Army they were trying to disband consisted of young officers and a rank and file who knew their ...”

“... the folksy cadences of Cage’s caressing enunciation of the name Sera recalls James Stewart. Henry Coster’s 1950 movie Harvey features Stewart playing another of Hollywood’s charming, indulged drunks, Elwood, a harmless nobody with a ten-foot rabbit friend that nobody else can see. Elwood is as matter-of-fact about his rabbit as Ben is about his ...”

“... of 1857 had underlined. As Meyer and Brysac indicate, The Lives of a Bengal Lancer, directed by Henry Hathaway and released in 1935, was Hitler’s favourite film. (Mussolini’s Motion Picture Bureau banned it, deeming it to be pro-British propaganda.) Major Francis Yeats-Brown’s book, whose title the film borrowed, was a memoir of life as an officer in ...”