“... a discussion on whether to award the duke the freedom of a City company, one London alderman had said: ‘Then let it be of the Butchers!’ In later years, distaste hardened into suspicion that Cumberland might be plotting a military coup and his own dictatorship. Walpole thought this was rubbish. ‘It is uncertain whether his inordinate passion for war ...”

“... Surely he settled into a last tranquil silence only because in The Tempest he had deliberately said his last word? As early as 1667 Dryden was identifying Shakespeare with Prospero, and the notion of The Tempest as the farewell of a magus to his art has been a commonplace ever since Edward Dowden published Shakspere ...”

“... Edward​ Long arrived ‘home’ in the ‘mother country’ in 1769 with his wife and three young children after 12 years as a planter in Jamaica. His return presented no problems. He was a colonist, a ‘freeborn Englishman’, welcomed back to ‘his’ country. His wife came, as he did, from an elite white dynasty and his children, though they were born in Jamaica, inherited his birthright ...”

“... towel, spare glove, umbrella and so on, has to be loaded into a bag the size of a portmanteau. Edward VII owned one made out of the skin of an elephant’s penis, a gift from a maharajah. There’s more than a grain of paradox in this reliance on manufacture. Golf is the most pastoral of games. Its contests take place among rolling hills or in a ...”

“... Deputy Foreign Affairs Minister, who regards EO as a poor ambassador for the new South Africa, has said that he would like to see an end to it. Barlow, however, likes to argue that relations with the Government are not so bad and that the bulk of South African opposition to EO comes from members of the old guard – Military Intelligence and other elements of ...”

“... of a real-life marriage. Scandalised critics called Froude a muckraker and traitor. Tennyson said he’d sold his master for thirty pieces of silver. Froude was mortified but unrepentant. He was used to controversy. James Anthony Froude by George Reid, 1881. The Life was a homemade bomb; the History was a meteorite, a bolide from somewhere remote ...”

“... What do​ the fish call Muhammad? One of his earliest disciples said that different creatures called him by different names. He was known as Abd al-Quddus under the sea and Abd al-Ghaffar among the birds, Abd al-Mughis in the insect kingdom and Abd al-Rahim to the jinn.‘His name is Ahmad,’ Jesus said of the one who would come after him, according to the Quran ...”

“... biographers pay too little attention, the words of his second wife, Elizabeth Hardwick. She said that ‘texts had been his life.’ A tycoon’s widow might equally say, and in the same spirit, that ‘money had been his life.’ The sharpest point that Marjorie Perloff makes is to quote from Ian Hamilton’s biography of Lowell, recalling his ...”

“... sympathies, as many ‘conformable puritans’ did in that period. Some biographers believe, as Edward Jones notes in his learned overview of archives relating to the young poet, that Milton lost sympathy with orthodox worship when an inspection of Horton parish church in 1637 required that the raised pew occupied by the Milton family should be lowered and ...”

“... Pearl Kazin (Alfred Kazin’s sister) was an editor at Harper’s Bazaar and her manner was said to be quite superior. She deployed it over the years to get American novelists to jump through hoops. And when she asked Mailer if he’d care to contribute something to her magazine we can now be grateful to Lennon for bringing us the following ...”

“... tired, I’ll just retire to bed.’ The inspector-general of police turned to my parents, and said: ‘I wish all your friends were like that! Where did you find such a cultured guy?’ A week later, when he was looking at pics of the disappeared CP leaders, he saw that the person he’d met at dinner was actually on the most-wanted list! So, it was a ...”

“... everything’ – while there are several books about women who ‘knew too much’. It’s often said that some quite ordinary people ‘know everything’, but that usually comes with qualifications too: you can ‘know everything’ if you win pub quizzes, or you can ‘know everything’ about birdwatching, or baking cakes, or The Archers. But the ...”

“... inconceivable. As Mr Brook-Shepherd points out, those who spy for the Soviet Union today, the Edward Howards in the US, the Geoffrey Primes in Britain, are prisoners of venality, lechery or blackmail. Their secrets may be important, but they will not be promoted as ‘internationalist’ models for a future Soviet generation or buried as heroes in ...”

“... he at least change that tell-tale K to a C? Because he was too stiff-necked, my mother said, and sighed. And so I became divided in myself; and this too, perhaps, made me seek refuge in the Otherworld. Early on, this otherworld exists for Richard as a Fairyland whose occasions are derived from the Border Ballads, with decor borrowed from artists ...”

“... that the recollections of those involved in that crisis bore no relation to what they had actually said or done at the time. But Mr Selden seems to have avoided most of the pitfalls of oral history. His book is a work of prodigious industry and will remain of great value to students of the period even when all the documents have appeared. In particular, his ...”