“... Ironically, Coleman’s ostentatious deference to the authority figures in Lennon’s life – William Ernest Pobjoy, the luckless headmaster of Quarry Bank Grammar School, once tannoyed at Goodison Park to deal with an outbreak of Lennonist insurbordination, Aunt Mimi (‘the guitar’s alright as a hobby, but you’ll never make a living’), and the ...”

“... has not happened in Australia. There is nothing comparable to the influence of Walt Whitman, Henry James or T.S. Eliot, say, on contemporary English practice and critical attitudes, or of Ruben Dario and Luis Borges on the practice of their craft in Spain. Nor is anything of the sort yet in sight. I have perhaps wandered rather far from the book I have ...”

“... back of the Labour Government had been broken. Harold Wilson resigned, and begged his successor, James Callaghan, to carry out a full-scale investigation into what he felt had been the subversion of his office by the security services. Callaghan refused. Although Wilson continued with his allegations, the security services felt reprieved. Wright’s ...”

“... British political history, as Rab Butler shrewdly remarked in 1940, was not the ultra-respectable William Pitt – a pilot who in fact failed to weather the storm – but the raffish, unreliable Charles James Fox, another politician with no deep attachment to the social order. Certainly Churchill wanted to preserve ...”

“... Kennedy spoke to just before he was shot – ‘He was always alert for a glimpse of Sisters,’ William Manchester says with unconscious irony – re-lives and reconstructs that day in November 1963, teaches history to her pupils as an immediate and bewildering experience. Oswald gets ready, thinks he is to kill Governor Connally, not Kennedy; David ...”

“... construction. We are told that the Union failed to work because the then prime minister, William Pitt the Younger, did not create a ‘United Kingdom identity’ following the 1801 Act, and a policy of ‘inertia’ towards Ireland soon prevailed. The best attempts at incorporative policies, according to Townshend, were Catholic Emancipation in ...”

“... that was nimble, intelligent and powerfully athletic. After riding a pirouetting Andalusian horse, William Cavendish, the Duke of Newcastle, reported that ‘I was so dizzy that I could hardly sit in the saddle.’ A ‘carrousel’ for Louis XIV, 1662 Pluvenal’s greatest refinement was the extravaganza of pomp that became known as the carrousel, a word ...”

“... up by the Government, saying there could be ‘no peace and security with Mr Taylor in power’. James Brabazon, a journalist who has travelled with Lurd, reports that many of the rebels fought against Taylor during the previous civil war and were not integrated into the Government Army when he became President. Lurd’s human rights record is said by some ...”

“... as sophisticated and as consistent in their styles, worldviews, personal ‘signatures’ as, say, William Faulkner – and thanks to Cahiers, few cinephiles would today think of disputing that. They were, however, less successful in their wager in the 1960s and 1970s, at the height of modern French radicalism, that film criticism should be written ‘as ...”

“... 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 ...”