“... Nicholas Rowe in 1709) adds force. The book opens with a brisk pair of essays by David Fallow and Michael Wood on the subject of his parents: John Shakespeare, born in about 1530, the son of a tenant farmer in the outlying village of Snitterfield, and Mary née Arden, some years younger, of a more prosperous family from Wilmcote. Neither of their baptisms is ...”

“... on collaborations which did not have enough Shakespeare in the mix. Pericles, a collaboration with George Wilkins, was also left out, though later included in the more capacious Third Folio of 1663-64. The early references to Cardenio are bodiless – a title without a text – but it is possible that one fragment of the Jacobean Cardenio survives ...”

“... a favourite conceit of conservatives. Before he became attorney general in Bush’s second term, Michael Mukasey informed civil libertarians that they, and not those who illegally tortured prisoners of war, were going to have blood on their hands. The offence of the liberals, he claimed bizarrely in the Wall Street Journal, was to advocate judicial oversight ...”

“... old Jewish community of Baghdad, moved to London as a young man, and came under the influence of Michael Oakeshott, then Britain’s best-known conservative political philosopher. On the moderate right was Anthony Smith, a British-born practising Orthodox Jew, who taught history in London throughout a long career. Convinced that the Jews were the most ...”

“... twice a week and we generally went on a Monday and a Saturday. Comedies were best, particularly George Formby, but we took what was on offer, never knowing whether a film had any special merit. Some came with more of a reputation than others, Mrs Miniver for instance with Greer Garson, Dangerous Moonlight (with the Warsaw Concerto) and Now, Voyager with the ...”

“... in government at the age of 76 under his fellow Etonian David Cameron, alongside his son-in-law George Osborne.) The 1979 Conservative manifesto barely mentioned privatisation, or denationalisation, as it was sometimes called. In 1968, when an internal party think-tank called the public sector of industry ‘a millstone round our necks’ and proposed some ...”

“... directly competitive with American counterparts. Presidential candidates, with the exception of George McGovern and Jesse Jackson, outbid each other in paeans of praise for Israel. The Administration has refurbished the strategic ‘understanding’ it made with Israel during Alexander Haig’s time as Secretary of State, as if the invasion had never ...”

“... recruits, they were required to hold a Bible and take the oath of allegiance to His Majesty King George the Fifth, his heirs and successors. According to Joe’s army record, he was demobilised three years later with ‘good character’, and no medals to suggest that his intention was anything other than to stay alive.I sent a copy of Joe’s naturalisation ...”

“... Richardson had insisted they were innocent and had been framed by the police. I recalled that Sir Michael Havers, who led for the Crown in the 1975 trial, had reasoned to the jury that if the Four were innocent, a huge conspiracy to pervert the course of justice must have taken place. Where did this leave Havers’s conspiracy? Had the Court of Appeal ...”

“... he had moved from Washington to live with and be cared for in the Camden home of his brother George and his wife Louisa. These years also marked the death of his favourite sister-in-law, Jeffe’s wife Mattie, and the devastating blow of his mother’s death. ‘The only staggering, staying blow & trouble I have had – but unspeakable – my physical ...”

“... in, the movies imported everybody from the theatre who knew anything at all about how to speak,’ George Cukor said. ‘It was like the parting of the Red Sea and they allowed a lot of people in.’ This expansion of personnel and technological innovation required a huge investment and major reorganisation of the business model into the much more hierarchical ...”

“... secretary of education; Jeane Kirkpatrick, the former UN ambassador; and the influential columnist George Will are also steadfast supporters. The US form of government offers activists many ways of influencing the policy process. Interest groups can lobby elected representatives and members of the executive branch, make campaign contributions, vote in ...”

“... the employees of the vast ‘realism v. anti-realism’ industry founded by his Oxford colleague Michael Dummett) when, following Locke, he insists that physical science is less bound up with human interests and needs than are, say, chess, novel-writing or the munitions industry. The question of whether any area of human culture could be less bound up with ...”

“... illness’ and quotes this entry: ‘went berrying, done some shoes, scot to breakfast and dinner George went away today but O dear what a life to live God help me to do my duty baked 5 pies drove cow.’ And could Carlyle have approved of the ocean-haul seine fishermen of Long Island whose way of life was being extinguished in the mid-1980s, just as Peter ...”

“... the public eye, although she saw the necessity of it.’ The two women went to the same school, St Michael’s Grammar, and they knew each other’s families from way back. Lurgan is the sort of place where everyone can seem to know everyone else. Dara finished a PhD in politics a few years ago at Queen’s University in Belfast – on community groups – and ...”