“... that the US should assume ‘leadership of a united democratic bloc’ against the authoritarian powers of China and Russia and has found an influential reader in John McCain, an old-style promoter of American toughness. But it’s now quite hard to imagine Hu Jintao and Vladimir Putin, not to mention Osama bin Laden and other ‘enemies of the Free ...”

“... the Merchant Adventurers, which led to his making the acquaintance of a fellow guildsman called Thomas Cromwell. Vaughan rose to a degree of professional eminence on Cromwell’s coat-tails, beginning in the years when Cromwell himself was merely a protégé of Thomas Wolsey. Together they helped Wolsey dissolve ...”

“... When Thomas Jefferson left the Presidency he wrote to Dupont de Nemours: ‘Never did a prisoner released from his chains, feel such relief as I shall on shaking off the shackles of power. Nature intended me for the tranquil pursuits of science, by rendering them my supreme delight. But the enormities of the time in which I have lived, have forced me to take a part in resisting them, and to commit myself to the boisterous ocean of political passion ...”

“... anecdote casting the artist in the role of perpetual adolescent. Nobody doubts that Dylan Thomas died of drink and a regressive, infantile personality: but the thing that is remembered about his last days is a remark (‘I’ve just had 18 straight whiskies, I think that’s the record’) which superbly typifies the kind of thing his public would ...”

“... Thomas Carlyle was quite fond of the Chartists – until they opened their mouths. In an essay on Chartism published in 1839, the Sage of Chelsea harangued the political establishment and spoke up for the stoic dignity of the English working man: ‘Chartism with its pikes, Swing with his tinder box,’ he wrote, ‘speak a most loud though inarticulate language ...”

“... have ‘Prometheus on His Crag’, an all too similar cycle of 21 poems, in which Hughes’s great powers of turning the visual into the verbal disappear into a welter of ‘powerful’ imagery. Hughes seems determined to escape from the limitations of what might seem to him his own too accurate gaze, but in the concluding cycle called ‘Earth-Numb’ he is ...”

“... worthless racket. Our Lady’s Gild threw its considerable resources at the case. It appealed to Thomas Wolsey, Henry VIII’s indispensable right hand: cardinal, archbishop, lord chancellor, Wolsey was a formidable broker of power. And it also bought the services of a clever (and therefore expensive) attorney. This was ...”

“... to suffer’), in Europe it would be centuries before this became part of medicine’s remit. In Thomas Dormandy’s sobering litany, St Teresa of Avila, Philip II of Spain, Charles II and Louis XIV were among millions who died in protracted and unnecessary agony: ‘All were surrounded by the best medical talent of their day. None was offered opium to ease ...”

“... What can have possessed Graham Greene? The answer, I suspect, is the ghost of Thomas Mann. The Swiss setting of Doctor Fischer of Geneva might be determined by some generic effluvium of Mann, a compound of his Magic (Swiss) Mountain, his post-war return to Switzerland and, perhaps, his rather landlocked position at the centre of European letters ...”

“... ends if and only if we consecrate our lives to God. Then you will believe that, in the words of Thomas Cranmer, the service of God ‘is perfect freedom’. Or suppose you accept the Aristotelian argument that man is a political animal, the argument restated as a theory of freedom by Hannah Arendt in Between Past and Future (1961). Then you will believe ...”

“... nuclear weapons. The outcome of these talks is easy to surmise: they will end with all the nuclear powers possessing more nuclear weapons than they did when the talks started. Once I would have worried about this also. Now I look forward to drinking the Perrier water even if the water talks succeed. To speak the truth, not an invariable practice with me, I do ...”

“... originality were often obscured. And there was a long final stretch in which Eliot’s creative powers quietly free-wheeled to a standstill. The early absorption of his work into the academic curriculum created a body of received opinion, and another considerable public has been assured by those who like the piety more than the poetry. The stratagems of the ...”

“... brutal coup. There’s an unofficial relationship between the authorities and the Daddy, as the powers-that-be use him to maintain order in exchange for privileges. Carlin plays by these rules until the second suicide, when, outraged at the injustice of it all, he precipitates a riot. The uprising is promptly quashed (unlike in If ... there’s no ambiguous ...”

“... edition of the Quran in Latin, and wrote the preface when it appeared. But for Catholics like Thomas More, it was Luther who was Muhammad, in his iconoclasm and his lust, a priest who took a wife and bid Protestant clergymen to do the same. Or it was Calvin: a Catholic almanac depicted Satan with one claw on the turbaned prophet’s shoulder, the other ...”

“... the title, ‘My Dear Mr Hopkins’. They are interesting only in so far as they show off her powers as an ‘advocacy journalist’ – she used the reports to press for more comprehensive and generous relief – and because they prefigure The trouble I’ve seen, her first literary success, which drew directly on the same material to produce a more ...”