“... 1972, five burglars were caught trying to plant a bug. The group comprised an electronics expert, James McCord, and four Cuban-Americans from Miami. It didn’t take the police and the FBI long to discover that McCord was the security co-ordinator for the Campaign to Re-Elect the President, known by its acronym – at once sinister and hapless – CREEP. The ...”

“... granddaughter of a sister of Henry VIII. In other words, she had the sort of claim that brought James VI to the throne of England in 1603 (he was a great-grandson of a sister of Henry VIII). By contrast, both Mary and Elizabeth had been officially declared bastards by their father; that had not changed by 1553. So it was perfectly plausible for Protestants ...”

“... the United States were mainly Southerners: between them, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison can take credit for drafting the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, winning the Revolutionary War, and preserving America’s independence through its turbulent early decades. The republic was governed by Southern presidents for 40 of ...”

“... W. is not dumb – narrow yes, facile certainly, but not dumb. Nor are his managers: to watch James Baker, Secretary of State under George I, work the courts and manipulate the media in Florida is to witness a pro at work. And Dick Cheney is the very definition of a veteran operative. Nevertheless, high on his resumé is the fact that Bush gave up ...”

“... is to choose a strong narrative line, which means travelling light when it comes to what Henry James called ‘solidity of specification’. The other is to put together a portrait ‘from the life’, which is what Parker has done. This book is not, primarily, about Isherwood’s career, but about Isherwood. And Isherwood was all about Isherwood. His ...”

“... Tyrone in the late 1810s, the Carnegies from Dunfermline in 1848. Andrew Carnegie’s father, William, an impoverished linen weaver in Scotland and a business failure in the US, left his son nothing but debts. Andrew Mellon’s father, Thomas, passed a bank on to his son, as well as millions of dollars in stocks, bonds and real estate. As Pittsburgh ...”

“... God’s work in this life. Radkau and others suggest that Weber would also have been affected by William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience, which also appeared in 1902, not least by James’s suggestion that ‘the real core of the religious problem’ lies in a cry for help. The two men met in Boston in ...”

“... the self-regarding swagger of a militia officer stationed in an English provincial town. In 1816, James Silk Buckingham (a future MP) devotes the first few thousand words of his account to the complaint that he has not been treated as a gentleman by the English consul. In 1850, another naval tourist and future MP jokes about being ‘unable to procure ...”

“... a typical case. He entered office as something of a liberal, warning the LAPD’s tyrannical chief William Parker to ‘stop making remarks about minority groups’. But then he received either a package or a personal visit from Parker – accounts vary – and switched to backing the police chief and his officers for the rest of his mayoralty. Since the ...”

“... about Bathsua Makin, a noted 17th-century polyglot, says she was presented at the court of James I because of her ability to ‘speak and write pure Latin, Greek and Hebrew’. ‘But can she spin?’ the king asked. John Gallagher relates this story and many like it in Learning Languages in Early Modern England, in which he assembles a rich body of ...”

“... their earliest included poem). The first half of the book has (in order) Tennyson, Emily Brontë, William Barnes, Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning, Clare, Carroll, Clough, Dante Gabriel and Christina Rossetti, and Arnold, who, fittingly, is the pivotal figure. After this, though big names are not lacking, their contribution weighs less, in several cases ...”

“... unfairly shown. But there is no mention of Peterley or Pennington in Nicolson’s diaries or in James Lees-Milne’s two-volume biography of Nicolson. There is no mention of them, or of this book, anywhere. They do not appear in the biography of Arthur Machen by Aidan Reynolds and William Charlton, though Peterley Harvest ...”

“... performer and avant-gardist, one of the first women to make her mark as a conceptual artist. William Burroughs is usually mentioned as the single most important influence on Acker’s writing, but, although he plainly was extremely important to her, the context in which she read Burroughs had already been set by the cultural formation that she had ...”

“... it’s The Chiltern Hundreds, which isn’t rubbish but a well-plotted light comedy written by William Douglas Home, with the legendary A.E. Matthews, Cecil Parker and David Tomlinson. I know the play well, or should, having been in it at school in the Tomlinson part. After a succession of female roles (including Katherina in The Taming of the Shrew), my ...”

“... travelled to Taipei and helped draft the league’s agenda; at the league’s 1974 conference William F. Buckley gave the keynote address. And then there was John Singlaub, a retired general and another of the league’s main organisers, who thought the US government had fumbled the urban counter-insurgency against the Black Panthers and other radical ...”