“... he hadn’t counted on how little one congressman (out of 435) could do. The speaker of the House, John Boehner, set the agenda, and Meadows was expected to do what he was told. ‘Boehner had “enforcers”, not unlike a Mafia don. If you didn’t vote how he wanted, these enforcers – most notably his leadership team – would ban you from congressional ...”

“... a pair of divine twins in the form of horses. This myth has survived in some unlikely places. John Aubrey ascribed the Uffington White Horse to the brothers, though more recent archaeologists have dated it even earlier, to the Bronze Age. In Lower Saxony, the horse-head gables featured on many farmhouses were still referred to as ‘Hengst und Hors’ as ...”

“... the cruelties he had seen? Conrad’s biographer Frederick Karl is unsure when this visit took place, but if we are to believe Casement’s Black Diary – and Angus Mitchell, who has edited The Amazon Journal of Roger Casement, thinks that we should not – it took place on 3 January 1904 and lasted only one ...”

“... Three episodes, three wars: The Allied armies took possession of Tientsin and Peking and the adjoining districts. At first many of the soldiers of the composite body acted in a brutal and licentious way. Men, women and children were outraged and murdered and cities looted ... Some foreigners came to the captured districts for loot: a most disgraceful episode ...”

“... with their secretaries. I imagined there were sub-species of adultery going on, up and down John Dalton Street, Cross Street, Corn Exchange, but we never did matrimonial, or if we did the clerks locked the files away from me, so my most recent take on male duplicity came from the novels of Thomas Hardy. The 1960s were behind us, the era of free ...”

“... also phoning it in. Witness the completely pointless recent remake with Kenneth Branagh as Poirot. John Malkovich is about to impersonate the great detective in a Christmas adaptation of The ABC Murders – now that one I’m looking forward to.) A novel in which the detective did it. A novel in which the entire structure of the story was suggested by a title ...”

“... seemed as if hermetically sealed, so relentless is their focus on who was in the room and what took place there. He specialises in what might be called bureaucratic procedurals, in which deep background reporting builds up a picture of momentous decisions emerging out of the accumulations of small amounts of power in a complex machine. But it has always ...”

“... Both here and in his earlier study of the Edinburgh Review and his first volume on Macaulay, John Clive shows no desire to use or manipulate the Victorians. He merely wants to understand them better. And what he comes to understand, as G.M. Young did before him, is that the Victorian resolutely refuses to behave in the way we think Victorians ...”

“... already ireful coloured persons gets to hear the ITV soundtrack on which the following exchange took place. Commentator: ‘The Cameroon goalkeeper learned his trade from the great German, Sepp Meier, and that is why he wears those black track-suit trousers. Meier gave them to him.’ Expert (chuckling): ‘I didn’t realise he was wearing track-suit ...”

“... Brontë and Elizabeth Gaskell united in their distaste for the robust feminist arguments of John Stuart Mill. ‘In short, J.S. Mill’s head is, I dare say, very good, but I feel disposed to scorn his heart,’ sniffed Charlotte in a letter to Elizabeth Gaskell. ‘Woman must obey,’ Christina Rossetti wrote in 1879. ‘Her office is to be man’s ...”

“... in the race for Labour’s deputy leadership against the candidate supported by the Tribune Group, John Prescott? Right again. Gordon Brown and Tony Blair. In The Candidate, the great American film about political compromise starring Robert Redford, a young welfare lawyer is persuaded against his instinct to go into politics to change the world. He starts by ...”

“... of their civil rights in order to spare the family from ruin or infamy. One noted alienist, John Haslam, hinted at an affinity between respect for property and sanity, insinuating that a disregard for or neglect of property was evidence of a delusional state. Asked whether miserly habits indicated unsoundness of mind, Haslam replied: ‘If those miserly ...”

“... he ran away three times in one week from the school to which an Essex County boarding scholarship took him. He managed to do well enough in his A-levels to get into Leeds University to read law, where he got a predictably disappointing degree. Both his parents were, in different ways, politically committed and Straw as boy and student had intense political ...”

“... Paddy Dignam, someone who never lived, then exit by torchlight to re-stage his burial, which never took place. In Dublin, as has been the custom for some years, perhaps a hundred will go to the cemetery where Dignam wasn’t buried, there to re-stage the same funeral, which never took place. A man in a brown mackintosh will ...”

“... Walker Evans, James M. Cain, Nunnally Johnson, S.J. Perelman, Dawn Powell, Joseph Mitchell and John O’Hara. Many of these celebrated figures, artists and authors approaching fifty at the start of the decade or only lately past it, grew up in small provincial towns, emigrated to New York in the Jazz Age and worked together in the city rooms of the Herald ...”