“... journalist, because I had only just got married, and I didn’t want to be parted from my husband, William Shawcross, who had been assigned to cover the war for the Sunday Times. In our room upstairs at the Hotel Royale, Saigon, I began looking at the New Testament, and was startled to find so few passages about the Mother of God. It seems naive of me – and ...”

“... known enemies, especially F.L. Lucas; and many undergraduates, especially women. The undergraduate William Empson, who did not go to lectures on principle, attended the morning-after discussions of them. They seem not to have been a spectacular success. Some judged them too recondite, and others were unable to hear much of discourses delivered in a low tone ...”

“... of fantasies, delusions and morbid brain fevers. Consider the following remark made by Anthony Harris, chief leader-writer of the Financial Times, in the issue of 10 February last year: ‘Brazil, Mexico and Argentina are close to collapse, and bank shares are rising ... Bankers have been cast in a play of illusion mounted by the governments and monetary ...”

“... From a small office in Jermyn Street, surrounded by haberdashers, Pujol and his case officer Tommy Harris dreamed up an army of entirely fictitious sub-agents dotted around the British Isles. These included ‘a wealthy Venezuelan student named Carlos living in Glasgow’, a waiter from Gibraltar who ‘found the climate in Kent very disagreeable’, a ...”

“... seemed to agree on the semiotic message given out by Florida’s Secretary of State, Katherine Harris, who appeared in Nancy Reaganesque red suits, blue eyeshadow and false eyelashes, and was roasted by the American press, with one especially cruel review from Robin Givhan in the Washington Post: ‘She took fashion – which speaks in riddles, hyperbole ...”

“... private fiefdom in the mid-19th century, America produced its own brand of freebooters, including William Walker, the Tennessee doctor who conquered and ruled Nicaragua for ten months and decimated the population of Costa Rica.Until the end of the 19th century the US state was in no position to undertake imperial projects outside its region, and its projected ...”

“... the lion’s share of her work, and her relationship with the magazine’s fiction editor, William Maxwell, was supremely important. Her economy is there, too, at the level of the sentence: nothing obvious needs to be spelled out, nothing needs saying twice. The writing is compacted, substantial, chunky – bristling with details of ...”

“... there was. We owe the widespread belief that Robin lived in the time of Richard I (1157-1199) to William Stukeley (1687-1765), an eccentric scholar of ancient British history who fabricated for him a crazy family pedigree going back to the Normans. Knight argues that the search for the historical Robin is as quixotic as the search for the historical ...”

“... permission for this and fingers those notorious reactionaries and outspoken Dyer supporters, Sir William Joynson-Hicks, the home secretary, and Sir Laming Worthington-Evans, then war secretary, but he can find no trace of the necessary arrangements in the papers of either ‘Jix’ or ‘Worthy’, suggesting that even they felt the need to conceal what they ...”

“... rendition mirrored the depiction of Reconstruction offered by leading academics such as William Dunning of Columbia University, who served as president of both the American Historical Association and the American Political Science Association. ‘The negro,’ Dunning wrote in Reconstruction, Political and Economic, 1865-77 (1907),had no pride of ...”

“... mothers, and a gallery of individuals working and living in near destitution. In Shoreditch, a Mr Harris, with his wife and children, was being ‘eaten alive by bugs’; in another ‘vile room’ in the same tenement, his elderly neighbour Mr Jones painted ‘Christmas sheets’ (presumably wrapping paper) from 9 a.m. every morning, managing forty dozen in ...”

“... is still in the library, and so are works by her cousin Elizabeth’s husband, James ‘Hermes’ Harris, of Salisbury, a proponent of education for women who, fifteen years after the countess’s death in 1758, kept alive the legacy of the Ladies Club when his daughters and their friends staged the first recorded all-female production of a Shakespeare ...”

“... in ‘went about my ways’. This is what one does despite the endless wondering. So when Frank Harris says, in one of the many brilliant interludes in The Invention of Love, ‘I think he stayed with the wrong people in Shropshire. I never read such a book for telling you you’re better off dead,’ he is right, but he’s missing, as Stoppard never ...”

“... Obama gave a speech about the person bleeding out in the delivery room being your wife. Kamala Harris promised to ‘protect crypto’. It didn’t work.Donald Trump was better at pandering to the mythology of the patriarchy. Men didn’t need to listen to a lady lawyer lecturing them about how to live their lives, nor did they need a social safety net. A ...”

“... appears a certain natural goodness verging on modesty.’ Three centuries later, in 1956, David Harris Willson’s biography took the hostile line. Scottish historians tended to be fairer, prompting Jenny Wormald to ask in 1983 whether James was ‘two kings or one?’, so different were his historical reputations north and south of the border. Wormald and ...”