“... Throughout his restless life he seems to have arrived at places without bothering to secure his cash flow. However, it is not hard to be at ease around the world when one knows everybody, and we still have roving paladins like that. In many respects Herbert’s life was wonderfully arranged. As an undergraduate in need of coaching he took Hilaire Belloc ...”

“... even if the correspondence that followed soon retreated into an altercation about what Just William may or may not have got up to.Blake Morrison’s As If, a study of the Bulger case, was published in 1997. The conclusions to be drawn from reading it are not particularly original: the boys should never have been tried in an adult court; children need ...”

“... father and son, both of whom bought oil leases in the hope of generating an unstoppable flow of cash. In The Bush Tragedy, Jacob Weisberg shows how Bush family traits explain some of George W.’s tactics and modes of decision-making. ‘What makes the family drama unusual,’ Weisberg says, ‘is the way it played out on a national and world stage.’ But ...”

“... through a dedicated printing company, whose incorporation in OUP remains a useful source of cash for the university). Like the KJB editions published by the two universities, the two books are beautiful to look at; they are written to the highest standards by two acknowledged experts, who despite their respective insights end up saying much the same ...”

“... the austere history of the LSE’s foundation by Sir Sydney Caine, or to what Dahrendorf calls ‘William Beveridge’s intriguing London School of Economics and Its Problems’ – some would point also to the celebratory history by Beveridge’s fellow intriguer, Jessy Mair, later Lady Beveridge. What this ex-director has pulled off, however, cannot be ...”

“... about art, theatre and history; about Blake, Ruskin, Faraday, Milton, Constable and Purcell. William Empson, who studied English with him at Cambridge in the late 1920s, and with whom he started the magazine Experiment, thought of Jennings as ‘quite unaffectedly a leader’ who ‘was rather unconscious of other people, except as an ...”

“... became engaged to the playwright and theatre critic Walter Kerr. He broke her heart. (Years later William Shawn told a colleague that Kerr would never write for the New Yorker ‘because of Maeve’.) In 1941, Brennan moved to Manhattan and soon found work at Harper’s Bazaar, where she stayed for seven years, rising through the ranks from a copywriter to an ...”

“... was his given name) and a married man. Kathleen gave up waiting for him and found a husband, William Manson, employee of a local dry cleaner. They moved to Cincinnati. She named the baby after her dead father, Charles. She was 16. And she was still a bit wild. She kept going out most nights, and after three years ...”

“... been understood by those who use and abuse them. In his introduction to The Naked Lunch (1959), William Burroughs tickertapes: ‘Junk is the ideal product … the ultimate merchandise. No sales talk necessary. The client will crawl through a sewer and beg to buy … The junk merchant does not sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to his ...”

“... in life he had. Even his name was scarcely his own. Mercy Bevin had six children by her husband William in the mining valleys of South Wales before they split up and she returned to her native Somerset village of Winsford, where quite a few years later she had a seventh child, Ernest, in 1881. Father unknown. Certainly Mercy never saw ...”

“... of the world’s ten largest banks and the 21 largest financial institutions are also Japanese. As William Horsley and Roger Buckley observe in their vivid review of the past 45 years, it is not surprising that by 1983, the Japanese prime minister had come in from the edge of the photographs that are taken at the end of international summits and was seen ...”

“... reflect so well on Elizabeth’s superior political skills. James’s prodigality in the giving of cash rewards and the bestowing of titles of honour are both considered by Ashton extremely damaging to royal prestige and influence – and again the comparison with Elizabeth’s careful management and reluctance to bestow titles is very unfavourable to ...”

“... but not targeted – had ‘in effect buried’ monetarism. But as the Observer journalist William Keegan recognised, Thatcher had ‘invested so much political capital in monetarism’ that she could ‘never admit publicly that it had been wrong’. Tim Lankester, Thatcher’s private secretary for economic affairs for the first two and a half years ...”

“... ungovernable temper’. Conolly’s twists and turns were satirised by Charles Reade in Hard Cash, where he appears as Dr Wycherley, ‘bland and bald’, and inclined to ‘found facts on theories instead of theories on facts’. Both Conolly and Browne interested themselves in phrenology, the contentious study of bumps on the head. Given that so little ...”

“... On the jacket of Playing the Game is a portrait of the man who played it: a portrait by William Strang (1859-1921), a Late Victorian artist now much undervalued. He did what is by far the best portrait of Hardy, and his special ability seems to have lain in pleasing his subjects and their public by making them look suitably grave and important, even a shade portentous, while at the same time revealing hidden traces of weakness, perhaps of meanness ...”