“... from constituencies with a wide franchise), the machinations of the government were widely known. Richard Carlile, the editor of the Republican, concluded that ‘the ministers have been playing with Thistlewood … they brought the Cato-street affair to maturity, just to answer their purposes for striking terror into the minds of the people on the eve of a ...”

“... Eugénie Servières’s Inès de Castro and Her Children Throwing Themselves at the Feet of King Alphonso IV of Portugal (1822) was both a richly coloured medieval history, and, as Spies-Gans suggests, a dramatisation of the subservient position Servières herself occupied: she had written repeatedly to the French government that year, requesting a ...”

“... in ‘Austin at Criticism’ (published in Must we mean what we say?), where an examination of J.L. Austin’s terms of criticism leads him to undo Austin’s claim that, in proposing a solution to a particular problem, G.E. Moore has made a mistake. As Cavell insists, one can accurately accuse someone of making a mistake only when one can provide definite ...”

“... or messengers. Ellison’s dream was of a different kind. His friends included the black novelist Richard Wright and critics like Kenneth Burke and Stanley Edgar Hyman; his heroes were Joyce and Eliot; he studied The Golden Bough for the mythical themes he hoped would make his novel immortal. Ellison aspired mightily and he dressed the part as he imagined ...”

“... naval base, black servicemen revolted when white soldiers celebrated the death of Martin Luther King by raising the Confederate flag. The US military leadership fumblingly tried to accommodate the growing number of Black Power activists in Vietnam – military bureaucrats started investigating commanders who did not allow black troops to wear Afros and ...”

“... who comprised the bulk of the parliamentary party. ‘It was the biggest internal fight since Jo Grimond defeated the Hayekians [in the 1960s],’ the former Lib Dem MP David Howarth told me. ‘The whole thing was in aid of a right-wing takeover of the party.’The Orange Book was a public relations disaster. The Labour Party accused the Lib Dems of ...”

“... with regret, and never gives up the hope of reform, but nowhere does he write as if he agreed with Richard Price, the hero of his father’s generation, about the perfectibility of social man through sheer enlightenment. Rather, he speaks of Price and Joseph Fawcett and others with a tender veneration, as great and good men, perhaps too good for the world. The ...”

“... I thought I was too grand to do interviews, but then I was asked to interview Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton on the set of some film. So I said, what the hell, I’ll do it. That initited the interviewing period of my life: I remember coming back and thinking. ‘It’s an absolute doddle, interviewing’ – I mean. Elizabeth Taylor was more famous than ...”

“... that came before him. And BBC managers are unsackable. In the recent judgment on the Cliff Richard case, besides criticising the rationale behind broadcasting the story in the first place (which, typically enough, was in part to avoid criticism for not broadcasting it), the judge found that the UK news editor was not a reliable witness and that the ...”

“... defined by reference to the Earth’s dimensions. When Britain obstructed these strange notions, Richard Cobden lamented his countrymen’s ‘Chinese conservatism’. On the whole, however, co-operation outweighed controversy. The French dominated the natural sciences and mathematics, but admired the British steam engine and its manifold applications. At ...”

“... in clogs and woollen skirt’ who took up arms and walked out fearlessly to confront her king and restore him to his throne. One of the many verses goes: Fiers enfants de la Lorraine Des montagnes à la plaine, Sur nous, plane ombre sereine, Jeanne d’Arc, vierge souveraine! Marjorie Annan Bryce in a Suffragette procession to mark George V’s ...”

“... it’s clear that Fanon was aware, in 1957, of how Abane had died – lured to a meeting with the king of Morocco, stopped on the road by his FLN rivals, strangled to death. When Fanon’s newspaper, months later, pictured Abane as ‘dead on the field of honour’ – when it declared that he had been wounded in a firefight with the French, and had fought ...”

“... Shaw, with his enormous output and variety of skills and interests, offers more scope than most. J.L. Wisenthals monograph deals with one such interest, studiously examining the backgrounds of Ceasar and Cleopatra, Saint Joan, and In Good King Charles’s Golden Days, and extending the discussion to many other plays. He ...”

“... it might be funniest if gangsters did have just these conversations, and why shouldn’t they? Richard Nixon and his aides turned out to talk exactly like the President Philip Roth had invented in Our Gang. Tarantino wrote Natural Born Killers after True Romance and before Reservoir Dogs. He says he hasn’t seen the Oliver Stone movie, and while we may ...”

“... master-class in doing politics the LBJ way. He wanted another of his mentors, the Georgia senator Richard Russell, to serve as his eyes and ears on the committee. Russell refused: he was too old, he said, and ill (he had emphysema); in fact he hated the idea of working under Earl Warren, the Republican chief justice and a man he despised. So Johnson got to ...”