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“... the prompting of the popular press and an anonymous letter to Lord Bute led to a pension from the king in 1762. Too poor to complete his Oxford degree though more learned than his tutor, Johnson, like Richard Savage, his friend and the subject of his first biography, ‘having no profession, became by necessity an author’. Johnson begins his Life of ...”

“... in The Tiger and the Rose; but he is evidently not quite satisfied with them. Turn for a moment to John Masters’s strangely similar novel, Man of War. It is an apologia for another sort of fighting man, a professional soldier. The hero, Dusty Miller, squeezes his way into the British Army during World War One, aged only 16; when World War Two comes ...”

“... Between 1938 and 1940, the Italian-American writer John Fante published three books. The first two – Wait until Spring, Bandini (1938) and Ask the Dust (1939) – were novels; the third, Dago Red (1940), was a collection of short stories. All three were well received. Ask the Dust disconcerted some of its reviewers, but Bandini was admired by James Farrell and Steinbeck praised Dago Red ...”

“... cold seat in the privy, then they ought to be profoundly grateful to Elizabeth I’s godson Sir John Harington, who in his extraordinary pamphlet The Metamorphosis of Ajax (or ‘A Jakes’ – get it?) invented the flushing water closet. The s-bend was beyond Harington’s technological reach (his privy discharged via a valve directly into a vault ...”

“... as a way of allowing honourable men to stay in office without appearing to want to do so. John Nott offered his resignation after the Falklands invasion but he allowed himself to be persuaded by Mrs Thatcher to stay in office. William Whitelaw has written that he wanted to resign as Home Secretary after an intruder had entered the Queen’s bedroom in ...”

“... just such a helmet looking as if he might be coming off duty from the foot of the Cross.25 July. John Schlesinger dies. The obituaries are more measured than he would have liked, the many undistinguished films he made later in life set against A Kind of Loving and Sunday, Bloody Sunday. He wasn’t by nature a journeyman film-maker taking whatever came ...”

“... is the 16th book about Laurence Olivier, and his foreword tells of two more biographers, John Cottrell and Garry O’Connor, too intent on their own deadlines to discuss their common quarry with him. All this activity may puzzle the lay person. Holden’s final pages report Olivier alive, as well as can be expected at 81, residing tranquilly in the ...”

“... value even to more obscure items such as the Irish writer Thomas Amory’s picaresque Life of John Buncle and The Triumphs of God’s Revenge against the Crying and Execrable Sin of Murder, a popular collection of tales of murder and revenge by the 17th-century Exeter merchant whom Coleridge called ‘honest Murthereo-Maniacal ...”

“... Ottawa hostess’ with a house in Ottawa and a summer home next to that of Premier Mackenzie King. She graduated to the company of the rogues and rascals from a life typified by lunch with Mrs Barrington Ward, wife of the Times editor (Mrs Ward ‘in a dark reddish dress with fully pleated collar, looking what the word charming means’), a world tour as ...”

“... Taking his tip from the 354 acknowledged bastards of Augustus the Strong, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland, Roy Porter paints a picture of universal libertinism in the 18th century, much of it ‘under the aegis of a benevolent Nature’, which raises as many questions as it makes statements. Some of the claims for unfettered fornication – a Scottish ...”

“... ceramic tiles. I’ve seen few things as beautiful; you could build a wall in them and outdo a king. Scott must have known that almost nobody would ever see them, but their presence is a bold and lovely fact. There are, too, flourishes built onto the walls, constellations of bricks like the work on the side of a cathedral, up near the top and too high to ...”

“... I face More of the epic would be discovered under the sand as time went on. In 1990 Stephanie Dalley added more lines to her edition from newly recovered pieces, but most of what’s left has probably been smashed in the course of the Iraq wars. It seems proper that a place of fire and dust, its skin scarred by warfare, should be the origin of the story of the Flood today: devastation in negative, flood and drought bound together ...”

“... with dung. Perhaps it was the arrival in London of boats full of faecal carbon that fuelled King Edward’s dislike of the stuff, but more likely it was the associations between coal and disease – or even the devil – that caused the ban, for at the time the English were highly suspicious of the black rock. They knew it came from underground, and the ...”

“... by the picture – which, as Unton put it, ‘did draw more speech and affection’ from the king than all his ‘best arguments and eloquence’.Novel techniques helped to intensify the effect of the portrait miniature. Hilliard used powdered gold to create a background of flames behind a lovestruck young man – the flames would have seemed to flicker ...”

“... was: that bloodied face, the hero’s grimace, the whole thing like a campaign advert directed by John Ford. In Milwaukee, I bumped into Robert Auth, a member of the New Jersey General Assembly, who began telling me and a Swedish journalist that the Republican Party had always been all about surviving and staying on course. ‘We’re shocked,’ he ...”