“... control over my life. There was a point not long ago when Dave Pelzer’s self-rescue manuals held the top three spots in the bestseller charts. In Britain, it is likely that one out of every 15 adults will have read a Pelzer book, and the ‘inspirational’ style in general, with its page-turning mix of the brutal and the banal, its triteness of phrase ...”

“... an anonymous poem, is said in one surviving manuscript copy to have been delivered at a dinner held by the Lord Mayor during the Christmas festivities that accompanied this visit, by ‘a Scottysh preyst sytting at oon of the syde tablys’. The poem is lavish in its praise of London, the Troy Novant of all cities, its river, its walls, its ...”

“... II to concede a constitution. ‘Clearly foreshortened and written in haste,’ is the verdict of David McLellan, the editor of the 1998 World’s Classics edition of the Manifesto, to which Attali adds only that he doesn’t see how the authors had time even to reread the thing, never mind rewrite it more carefully. By the time it appeared in mid-February ...”

“... nicely gauges the social spectacle of Banks’s life. It suggests what some critics have long held: that Banks was a promoter whose talents were unlikely to have shone anywhere but in the still politically impotent domain of barely-organised science. Historians of science have puzzled over Banks’s achievement. He was undoubtedly the premier scientific ...”

“... pulled down over his eyes a black straw hat the brim of which he extended with his hand held out over it like an eye-shade, as though to see whether someone was coming at last, made the perfunctory gesture of annoyance by which people mean to show that they have waited long enough, although they never make it when they are really waiting, then ...”

“... lives before they would be promoted to tenancy. In the agriculture of the day many tasks were held as suitable for specific age groups. After working at a boy’s task an adolescent would graduate to harder manual labour in another household, and eventually by saving and gaining skills might with maturity graduate to a higher status of farm occupancy or ...”

“... on ‘observation’: ‘In short – without going so far as to say that the same rules held good for the artist as for the natural scientist – he, the cardinal, would be so bold as to suggest to his honoured colleague, del Monte, the dangers of depending too slavishly on the earthly and imperfect in one’s efforts to create beauty.’ Del Monte ...”

“... powers of Ernest Bevin (‘his crowning achievement’, in the words of the new foreign secretary, David Lammy). Apps describes Bevin as ‘the man who would strike the initial spark that started Nato’ and who took the ‘first faltering steps’ towards its creation. But however long you pick over Bevin’s correspondence with George Marshall and Arthur ...”

“... In the painting which shows Wyndham flaubertising in the foreground, the background originally held the figure of the model Jerry Hall breastfeeding her baby. She sat thus for several months, until one day she called in sick. When, a couple of days later, she was still unfit to pose, the enraged Freud painted over her face and inserted that of his ...”

“... Baldwin died’. Philip Roth has been led to histories of American racism by Coates’s books. David Brooks credits him for advancing an ‘education for white people’ that evidently began after ‘Ferguson, Baltimore, Charleston and the other killings’. Even USA Today thinks that ‘to have such a voice, in such a moment, is a ray of light.’ Coates ...”

“... as they were supposed to. Over Palestine/Israel in the 1940s and 1950s, for example, Britain held intelligence back from the Americans because the two countries were ‘at loggerheads’. There were frequent personality clashes, the most serious of them in the 1980s between Peter Marychurch of GCHQ and Bill Odom of NSA, who regarded Marychurch as a ...”

“... of royal privileges, seemed to degrade the nobility of literature and ideas. This was the view held, for instance, by Sir Samuel Egerton Brydges, antiquarian, forger, embezzler and (as Johns writes) a ‘self-deluding impostor of extraordinary proportions’. Brydges spent much of his life composing unremarkable sonnets (about 2000 a year as he got ...”

“... which is where you’ll be shopping if you decide to follow your dream of becoming the next David Foster Wallace – who did have to work, incidentally, like the rest of us. (At Pomona College, Foster Wallace’s ‘Prose Fiction’ class consisted entirely of getting students to read mass-market bestsellers.) Why are there no great novelists any ...”

“... has come to a head faster than expected as a result of the Scottish independence referendum and David Cameron’s political ambition. Labour has (or had) an electoral interest in keeping Scotland in the Union. The Conservatives do not. Their loyalty to the United Kingdom is sentimental, not electoral. The practical argument against Scottish independence was ...”

“... what amounted to pocket money. (He did better in this respect than the feeble-minded Mr Dick of David Copperfield, who is supplied with pocket money but not allowed to spend it.) Not long after becoming third earl, he fled from home for a brief period in the company of his Swiss valet, though whether this was an abduction or an elopement is hard to say. The ...”