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“... as we can. The idea may sound fanciful, but it is pursued with remarkable force and fascination in Richard Holmes’s study. Richard Savage, the young Johnson’s alter ego, was a poor and talented writer whom Johnson had met in Grub Street. Each took a fancy to the other, and they became companions in want in London’s ...”

“... novel, not a puzzle, and the reviewer need not be too shy of revealing the plot. The martyr, Richard Alderman, is a dull, decent father, an insurance man with two sons, a wife and a chic, youthful mother-in-law, more classy than himself. (I visualise them as something like the families in Rebel Without a Cause.) ...”

“... at a once familiar corner. Part of it was gone. The Walgreen’s drug store where, as teenagers, Richard and I had tormented Louie, was gone, replaced by a huge, white, faceless department store, as was the jewellers where I had stood for hours desperately wanting those hideous rings with heavy red and purple stones in them. In almost every other way ...”

“... and displace. His real hero was CIA director Casey, who suffered from what his predecessor Richard Helms called Fingerspitzengefühl – ‘a feel for the clandestine’. North reports: ‘I knew nothing of covert operations when I came to the National Security Council but Casey taught me a great deal.’ From 1983 onwards (whatever their part in the ...”

“... at the end of his Wars of the Roses tetralogy: while Henry VII may have been as murderous as Richard III, he was nothing like as charming. Francis Bacon was ready to praise Henry’s politic wisdom in the 1622 biography that was to frame perceptions of the king until late in the 20th century, but he could not disguise the price of Henry’s determination ...”

“... beyond exotic sex slaves. He starred in two new ballets choreographed by Fokine, Le Spectre de la rose and Petrushka. The former was based on a rather morbid poem by Théophile Gautier in which the ghost of a rose addresses the girl who has taken him home as a souvenir from her first ball: ‘O toi qui de ma mort fus cause ...”

“... to have given birth to a cat. The champion cad was Francis Lane, who in 1608 promised to marry Rose Arnold, got her pregnant, tried to push her down a well and claimed another man was the father. Rose ‘wandered up and down in Northamptonshire until I was delivered of childbirth’: she lost the baby, but still wanted ...”

“... combined, and John Wayne was in one of them. Orange County is in Southern California, home of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, of Hollywood, Disneyland and John Wayne. Nixon would have lost his home state and the White House in 1968 without his Southern California support. At the 1984 Republican Convention, Reagan, our second Southern California ...”

“... Richard SennettA few years ago, Michel Foucault and I discovered we were interested in the same problem, in very different periods of history. The problem is why sexuality has become so important to people as a definition of themselves. Sex is as basic as eating or sleeping, to be sure, but it is treated in modern society as something more ...”

“... done as sexual objects. A pregnant woman has a claim staked out; she is not for sale.’Neel rose to prominence in the late 1960s with the emergence of second-wave feminism. In 1970, on the back of a petition organised by the feminist art historian Cindy Nemser, her work appeared for the first time in the Whitney’s annual exhibition. The same ...”

“... box that she has covered, she tells us, in shell pink brocade. And then she has a battle with Rose, the servant, who can’t believe that she wants the mousse kept hot over a pot of boiling water so she can eat it herself. After all, ‘it may be hours till lunchtime.’ Nothing gets in the way of Aroon and her food. ‘If it was a smothering you ...”

“... On 22 February 1965, the fifth month of Harold Wilson’s first ministry, Richard Crossman recorded the following in his Diaries of a Cabinet Minister: Then Harold Wilson raised the issue of Anthony Howard. He has just been appointed by the Sunday Times to be the first Whitehall correspondent in history, looking into the secrets of the Civil Service rather than leaking the secrets of the politicians ...”

“... Beatrice Potter was born in 1858 at Standish on the edge of the Cotswolds. Her father, Richard Potter, was a well-to-do (mainly self-made) businessman to whom she was devoted. Relations with her mother seem, however, to have been uneasy: the diary mentions ‘a kind of feeling of dislike and distrust which I believe is mutual ...”

“... to a French princess, with its rhetoric of historical effacement; on the other, the scene of Richard III’s nightmares at Bosworth, in which the past erupts to confound its own erasure. For Mullaney it is Talbot, the betrayed martial hero of Henry VI Part I, who stands for what is systematically forgotten in the remainder of the cycle: his, after ...”

“... television cameras for the broadcasting of debates that the cameras were rolling as the Law Lords rose in turn to vote on the outcome of the appeal. I mention this because it has come to be believed that in a sudden rush of PR-consciousness special arrangements were made to televise the delivery of the first Pinochet judgment in the House of Lords. The truth ...”