“... edition aims to bring us closer to the person, so the editors are mindful of the ghost of Lawrance Thompson, the biographer and editor of Frost who was eager to disabuse readers about the personality they thought they knew. Thompson’s biography – shot through with personal grudges and unverifiable anecdotes – portrayed ...”

“... and then, without bothering to consult the operational War Diaries, proceeds to spin out the John Connell-Correlli Barnett myth that Montgomery’s only contribution to the Desert arena was an incomprehensible uplift in morale. Monty’s plan for the defence of Alam Halfa, he declares, was inherited from Auchinleck: he neglects to mention that ...”

“... restore one’s faith in human nature, do at least remove it from the critical list. Pilot Hugh Thompson was so revolted by what he saw of the carnage from the air that he put his helicopter down in order to intervene, giving his gunner the memorable order that he should be prepared to fire on Americans if necessary. The military hierarchy in the Vietnam ...”

“... this technique into his most significant creation, the Daily Mail. In 2012, the journalist John Rentoul produced a satirical essay on the art of the newspaper headline called Questions to Which the Answer Is ‘No!’ It was a homage to Harmsworth, the Mail and their many imitators. Harmsworth had a lifelong thirst for curious facts. On a world tour ...”

“... an elaborate theatrical spectacle, appealing to the emotions instead of reason. At the centre of John Barrell’s exhaustive study of treason in the mid-1790s is a brilliantly sustained argument about the struggle to fix the character of the word ‘imagination’. Unlike the battle then being fought over such important political terms as ...”

“... in the 1990s was self-imposed. But as Georgina Born makes clear in her definitive analysis of the John Birt and Greg Dyke eras, the consistent impetus came from government. It’s no surprise that Margaret Thatcher wanted to take on the BBC – if anything, the surprise is how long it took her. (In her first term, Thatcher’s main concern was with BBC ...”

“... She was related by marriage to some of Britain’s most influential families, including the (Lord John) Russells and the Trevelyans; her father, Sir Hugh Bell, was also a Liberal MP. She took a brilliant First in history after only five terms at Oxford, despite enjoying an active social life. Her interest in the East began at 25, when she spent six months at ...”

“... helping him, perhaps she is hoping to help herself; ‘I think I’ve discovered the next Hunter Thompson,’ she writes to her publisher – the tone is bigged-up, swaggering, grandiose. And so, she has her brainwave. They talk a lot about movies, and they both like movies (8½, Charlie Kaufman) in which an apparent impasse is solved by a recursive ...”

“... of Communism reported by former believers; Rabbi Stephen Wise addressing an anti-Nazi rally; John Galsworthy’s protest about planes being used for war – ‘For the love of the sun, and stars and the blue sky, that have given us all our aspirations since the beginning of time, let us leave the air to innocence!’ ‘The guiding principle,’ says ...”

“... the suppression of working-class speech over the centuries. Harrison himself, believing with E.P. Thompson and other historians that ‘the dumb go down in history and disappear’ and that ‘the tongueless man gets his land took’, determinedly departs from that silent heritage: for him,                           the job ’s ...”

“... which won the battle of Lepanto – still to be seen on the great pale blue banner for Don John of Austria’s flagship, now in Toledo – could be regarded as a practical way of encouraging solidarity, and perhaps it took no longer to complete than it took for the alliance to prepare its navy. The author claims that it was in the 17th century that ...”

“... the nation that existed between Margaret Thatcher’s ‘there’s no such thing as society’ and John Major’s ‘it’s time to understand a bit less and condemn a bit more.’ I felt for the boy being led away but also for the boys leading him, and I believed there was not only a terrible death beyond what we could see there, but lives too, the life of a ...”

“... the case with Alzheimer’s that illness uncovers truth, it seems both to Murdoch’s husband, John Bayley (‘Puss’), and to her biographer, Peter Conradi, that it did so here. In their view Murdoch’s advancing illness, crumbling away language and reason, laid bare in her an essential impulse toward love. As words broke up, it was the vocabulary of ...”

“... therefore, that contributors to the first wave of ‘history from below’, including E.P. Thompson, used working-class memoirs so sparingly, cherry-picking from already known and accessible texts. But this soon changed. John Burnett used annotated extracts to illustrate various aspects of working-class life in ...”

“... Kesey, Carlos Castaneda or Robert Bly; nor did he adopt the unhinged expressionism of Hunter S. Thompson. He never wanted to build a movement, evangelise for drug use or found a school. Instead, he leaves space for scepticism and the possibility that there’s more than one way of understanding ‘expanded consciousness’. Riddley Walker is where the New ...”