“... her own research. Think how knee-capped biographers of Stoppard’s contemporaries Alan Bennett or Simon Gray might feel, faced with the life told in the dazzling diaries. Which is not to say that Stoppard has been costive about discussing his work. His speaking voice is familiar – so familiar that you hear the snag of his blurred ‘R’ while reading the ...”

“... bourgeoisie, and had led to the triumph of capitalism. Now, in these books by William Doyle and Simon Schama, we have two further reappraisals of this event written by British-born scholars. Both see the Revolution as a tragedy. Both argue that the initial impetus was not social or economic change. And both are very much historians of their time in giving ...”

“... up in palatial style here but so did Spencer’s ex-friend the convicted fraudster Darius Guppy; Simon Mann, the leader of the attempted mercenary coup in Equatorial Guinea in 2004; and Teodorin Nguema, the playboy son of the Equatoguinean dictator, Obiang Nguema, whom Mann was trying to overthrow. It was Thatcher’s involvement as a financial backer of ...”

“... horror, jeopardise, imperil, vulnerable, panic abound. Only pages into The Humbling we hear that Simon Axler, a celebrity actor, is ‘awash with terror and fear’. In each book a close acquaintance of the central character dies unexpectedly in a way quite unconnected with the main events. Roth asks how we can live a full life given the precariousness of ...”

“... to hunt down French novels on the Left Bank. In most un-Tory fashion, he formed an immediate and strong attachment to the French Socialist leader of the Popular Front, Léon Blum, who, to Eden’s delight, allowed him to browse in and borrow from his own large private library. It is doubtful if any other Tory MP snatched the time to read and reread ...”

“... of strike ballots held under the 1984 Trade Union Act resulted in votes for industrial action, Simon Deakin comments that the Government became ‘conscious that the 1984 balloting laws had backfired.’ In fact, the figure of 90 per cent of ballots for strike action was not a result of the failure of the 1984 Act, but of its success in forcing union ...”

“... as gatekeeper for the commercial publisher, keeping his corridors clear of unwanted petitioners. Simon and Schuster (motto: ‘there’s no such thing as a good book that doesn’t sell’) offer the following typical disincentive to intending authors: All unsolicited manuscripts will be returned. Only manuscripts submitted by agents or recommended to us by ...”

“... coalitions. They dislike the negotiations required to set them up and believe them inimical to ‘strong’ government. Our electoral system is designed to minimise the need for them, and since 1945 even minority governments have been exceptional. Only one, James Callaghan’s, was based on an agreement with another party, and the collapse of the Lib-Lab Pact ...”

“... Life (1989). Gould discussed the bizarre fossils uncovered by the Cambridge palaeontologist Simon Conway Morris in an outcrop of rock in the Canadian Rockies, known as the Burgess Shale. The shale was formed 511 million years ago, in the period when animal life was first emerging. Buried within it Conway Morris found the fossils of extraordinary ...”

“... its moment, being published soon after Cripps was ejected from the War Cabinet. Eric Estorick, a strong admirer, wrote two, the second of which (published in 1949) was widely read. Both Strauss and Estorick were, as Clarke puts it, ‘partisan’ and made use of ‘selective access’ to Cripps’s private papers. His widow, Dame Isobel, a vigilant guardian ...”

“... World leader with a penchant for stealing from the state, ruled from 1974 to 1979, and took the strong statist line that was popular during the boom years. The rights to oil extraction were taken away from Shell, Exxon and other foreign companies, and state funds were poured into industrial development, to the applause of left-wing nationalists ...”

“... struggle between the Soviet Union and the Allies’.Fitzpatrick has always been drawn to strong arguments, and she makes one here. She credits two factors – a deepening Cold War antagonism that disposed the Western Allies to ‘rebrand’ these DPs as victims of communism, and the ‘agency’ of DPs themselves – for an unusually swift and ...”

“... playing a central role in the – by French standards – market-friendly Fondation Saint-Simon. Together with Furet, he celebrated the exhaustion in the 1980s of both communism and Gaullism. By 1989, the bicentenary of the Revolution, what remained was a moderate république du centre.In 2001, Rosanvallon was given a chair at the country’s most ...”

“... of France. Now the Foreign Office needs to know whether he or the other man was the traitor, and Simon Milson is dispatched to holiday at the suspect’s villa and plumb him. Arrived there, both Milson and the novel itself are sharply and guardedly observant, and if the book is spare, it is spare as an animal on the scent would need to be, taking ...”

“... his books and they didn’t care for themselves in them. His elder brother, Maury (the basis for Simon in The Adventures of Augie March, Julius in Humboldt’s Gift, Shura in Herzog, and at least two other characters), was a liberty-taking, criminally minded businessman who loved his bookish brother but thought him a waste of space, not a success in the way ...”