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“... Scheuer criticises pundits – from the elderly Orientalist Bernard Lewis to the neocons on Fox – for consistently dismissing bin Laden as insane. ‘Bin Laden is described,’ Scheuer writes, ‘alternately as a “stateless psychopath”, a man of “mad ambitions”, the leader of “a new breed of savage and suicidal terrorists”’ who follow a ...”

“... based on the life of Hutton’s grandfather, C.W. Post, to Jesse Lasky, who had just joined Fox as a producer. Lasky expected a brief treatment; what he got instead was the ‘most perfect script’ he had ever seen. ‘I felt that proceeding sans director and sans teammates,’ Sturges said later, ‘gave me an opportunity to show how I thought it ...”

“... is no difficulty, as Thompson points out, in reinterpreting it as a Downton Abbey affair. James Fox’s articles in the Sunday Times and the New Review saw in it the ‘whole waterlogged English class system’ sinking under its own weight. But the system has proved remarkably buoyant. Old Etonians and alumni of the Bullingdon Club continue to thrive. By ...”

“... 2000, when the PAN won the presidency with the election of the former Coca-Cola executive Vicente Fox, the old networks of political patronage that had contained and controlled the drug smuggling industry were in disarray. The cartel leaders broke free from the system that had kept them in check. The old arrangement was turned on its head. Traffickers had ...”

“... requires unpacking. The stars aside, the first generation of Hollywood executives – William Fox, Samuel Goldwyn, Carl Laemmle, Jesse Lasky, Marcus Loew, Louis B. Mayer and Adolph Zukor – were, by the 1920s, the most colourful symbols of America’s dynamic, expanding motion-picture industry; and from the 1920s till the present day, observers have ...”

“... not only of the famous. She brings alive for the reader a host of lesser characters: the cuckolded Charles Bagot, ‘pink, erect in native dignity, and, I hope, not valuing her’ – his wife – ‘a pinch of snuff’; old Lady Carlisle in a portrait ‘attitudinising with vases’; the hunting-mad Duke of Beaufort and the ‘brisk intelligent alacrity with ...”

“... Daguerre announced his ability to ‘seize the light’, a claim soon rephrased by William Henry Fox Talbot as the art of ‘fixing a shadow’. As for 1865, it’s the year that marks, along with much else, the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, the end of the American Civil War, and the inauguration of photography’s increasingly public role in the ...”

“... of ours in Oxfordshire, where the hunt and the motor car between them have wiped out most of the fox population, leaving rabbits to proliferate. I fetched him back six frozen rabbits in a holdall – a frozen rabbit, I can tell you, is almost a yard long from tip to tip – and Romano made casseroles with tomato and thyme which the lunchtime customers fell ...”

“... the Two Acts in December 1795, and in that sense – as part of an alliance which stretched from Charles James Fox through the genteel supporters of the Society for Constitutional Information to the largely shopkeeper and artisan LCS – he did perform a leading role. With a scrupulous sense of this borderline ...”

“... to live in a chocolate factory, and outwitted like the murderous farmers who wait outside Mr Fox’s lair only to be trounced by his cunning. Quite right. Dahl has a proper relationship with childish desires and best we keep out of it. Except, perhaps, for the recognition that there are other more gracious childish desires which can also be catered ...”

“... Samuel Parr (‘the Whig Dr Johnson’), the great liberal advocate Thomas Erskine, R.B. Sheridan, Charles James Fox, the novelists and dramatists Elizabeth Inchbald, Thomas Holcroft, Amelia Alderson, Mary Hays and Charlotte Smith, as well as Godwin’s publisher George Robinson and a number of dissenting ministers ...”

“... of our liberties’ (Blackstone) and ‘the great palladium of the liberties of the subject’ (Charles James Fox). Technically known as the writ of habeas corpus ad subjiciendum et recipiendum, it was one of a family of writs containing the words ‘habeas corpus’. Other forms (less long-lived and much less well ...”

“... I were just going home when the hounds got away after a big cub (I believe it was an old fox!) – we had a glorious run for about half an hour. She is always going away to recover from a series of ailments, including tonsillitis, bronchitis, lumbago and blood poisoning, and her letters from Winston are full of tender solicitude, and requests not to ...”

“... Like​ the knives of Chinese jugglers’, Charles Bataille said of his friend Félix Nadar, ‘turbulent, unexpected, terrifying’. Adam Begley’s biography describes a life lived so frenetically, it’s surprising it lasted so long – Nadar died at the age of ninety, in 1910. Yet he is remembered today primarily for the stillness and serenity of his photographic portraits of 19th-century Parisian luminaries ...”

“... we learn from the intimate and largely unpublished letters that are the raw material of Nicholas Fox Weber’s biography, Le Corbusier was still justifying his work, his name and his fame to his mother, by then in her late nineties. As always, he was trying to gain her favour over his (only just) older brother, the gentle but troubled Albert, a musician. The ...”