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“... ditch, while another (a dancing master, maybe) skips into the limelight. The Elizabethan satirist John Marston was repeatedly mocked for his line ‘Let custards quake, my rage must freely run,’ but his opposition between a wobbling but self-contained cowardly custard (he is thinking of a set custard rather than a sauce) and his own free-flowing inspired ...”

“... Ministers, only Ernest Bevin (two vols down, one to go) and Nye Bevan (canonised by Michael Foot) have received extended treatment, while the massive life of Churchill is unique in its Victorian dimensions. Today, the best way for a politician to guarantee this much-coveted form of life after death is to write it himself. And if he entertains ...”

“... in arguing that it should be turned back in order to save General Galtieri’s face. Even Michael Foot, however, was obliged to dismiss Mr Dalyell from his shadow ministerial post for forcing a division of the House on the Falklands issue on 20 May 1982. One Man’s Falklands is frankly polemical: it makes some valid criticisms but so overstates its case that ...”

“... Davy, and lay on his innocent life the burdens of their love, need or cupidity, are his father, John Chadwick, his mother, Dawn Chadwick, and their old friend (or acceptable enemy, depending how you read it), William Nelson. These people are all failures, all refugees, all victims. Chadwick is a failed stockbroker. Nelson is a man in what used to be known ...”

“... that he can walk on water, but he also possesses a remarkable capacity for shooting himself in the foot. And in marrying Lady Diana Spencer, he thought he had chosen the ideal bride, yet it turned out that he had made the most terrible mistake of his life. The most important thing that a Prince of Wales has to do is to choose the right wife. Neither George IV ...”

“... of a phone when Nora was 80 cost her the excitement of letters coming up the road with John Willie McGrath, the postman, on his bike, and the installation of a television when she was 85 meant that her friends gave up their twisting narrations in favour of Dallas reruns, so the introduction of modern toiletry removed from Moveen for ever the ...”

“... next season’s lightning strike against a crop that had to be picked within a week, or rot at the foot of the tree? How did the popular history of the Okies come to depart from the facts as historians have now begun to uncover them? As Charles Shindo sees it, the answer lies in the political mismatch between the migrants and those who tried to explain and ...”

“... and tells me ideally she would vote for a bizarre dream-ticket of Bradley and Republican senator John McCain, who both advocate it. But most are straightforwardly undecided between Bradley and the other Democratic contender and favourite, Al Gore. Bradley arrives, six and a half feet tall and ramrod straight. He walks round the room, shaking hands and saying ...”

“... The mutual dependency of insiders and outsiders was established. The press, which has a foot in both camps, Grub Street being somewhere on the undrawable map of bohemia, has been serving it up to shock or amuse readers ever since. However much it may dislike it, bohemia is always complicit with convention. Its members are too individualistic to take ...”

“... off-message, tried to avoid him afterwards. Mirsky seems not to have registered that he had put a foot wrong. But over literary standards Mirsky did not always conform. He sedulously attended union meetings and voted for absurd resolutions; he omitted mention of Russian writers in exile – even of Tsvetaeva. In 1934, however, he provoked a series of blazing ...”

“... rose from the burning roofs of monasteries, not from animal funeral pyres; the crisis was not foot and mouth but rebellion. The Pilgrimage of Grace, as the convulsions came to be known, was the largest and most menacing of a succession of ‘Tudor Rebellions’, to quote the title of a seasoned classic by Anthony Fletcher (1968), recently revised by ...”

“... possibilities, suddenly believing, as he said, ‘that mankind can be redeemed by beauty’. Five foot four inches tall, Nijinsky was full of grief and also full of exuberance. By the time he met Diaghilev he was already admired by every passing prince, a boy genius with feline limbs and a burgeoning sense of the power of immorality. Diaghilev, like the Baron ...”

“... the city of Van, where they lived through the massacres of 1915, then perilously escaped Turkey on foot to settle in Yerevan in Russian Armenia. In 1919 his mother starved to death in the famine. The children were taken in by an uncle, and friends helped to arrange for their passage to America at the beginning of the following year. Gorky always honoured ...”

“... ungulate things in public. Certainly a waterfall is more striking than the parking lot near its foot, but I wonder how it is that visitors can be so sure they saw what they were supposed to and so oblivious of what they were not. Wordsworth wrote in ‘Tintern Abbey’ of those rural places which, in ‘the din/Of towns and cities’, gave him ...”

“... that such a tag would seem appropriate to describe any other poet of the 20th century. Why her? John Ashbery’s praise for Bishop as a ‘writer’s writer’s writer’, whose work ‘inspires in writers of every sort’ an ‘extraordinarily intense loyalty’, seems apt. And Ashbery knew that to say such a thing might be to pay ‘an ambiguous ...”