“... deathbed scribblings of Robert Greene, but is nowadays attributed to its ostensible ‘editor’, Henry Chettle. It scoffingly refers to him as ‘Shake-scene’ and calls him an ‘upstart crow, beautified with our feathers’, in other words a plagiarist. This episode is the subject of a very interesting essay by Andy Kesson. Sociologically speaking, his ...”

“... claimed to have seen him behind the counter. Then he’d joined the Rep before becoming a star. James Mason was another local boy who had made good, though from what beginnings I wasn’t sure: maybe he’d worked in a gents’ outfitters too.‘Making good’ meant getting out, as you would have to do if you were going to be a film star, but which applied ...”

“... its threats to expose the identities and whereabouts of the two boys who had killed the toddler James Bulger and were now about to be released. Nothing in her decision turned on a confidential relationship – there was none – between the youths and the press: what mattered was the nature of the information and the risk it posed to their privacy and ...”

“... or not this bit of gossip is true, that ending would have fitted the epic sweep of the movie. But James Harvey found the happy ending a relief: ‘Sensible people don’t kill or maim each other for revenge or honour or empty matters of pride.’† And for Pippin the happy ending fits because the film was not really an epic to begin with: Dunson’s cattle ...”

“... of an international world order’. In the process the Congolese have paid a high price. When Henry Morton Stanley arrived in 1876 the huge landmass, mostly covered in forest and coinciding with the drainage basin of the river, had been ravaged by the slave trade and the hunt for ivory; tribal chieftains had lost out to Portuguese merchants and ...”

“... them. These claims were kept up by Rockingham and Burke as long as the former lived, by Charles James Fox and Burke thereafter, and by Fox after his breach with Burke over the French Revolution. They always carried intimations of improper royal behaviour, and came to amount to the claim that the King should accept his ministers from Parliament and should ...”

“... produced last January by a small number of ‘hand-picked’ analysts – as James Clapper, the director of National Intelligence, described them – from the CIA, the FBI and the NSA. The claims of the last were made with only ‘moderate’ confidence. The label Intelligence Community Assessment creates a misleading impression of ...”

“... of unguarded speech. ‘The tongue is a fire, a world of iniquity,’ warned the Apostle James. ‘The tongue can no man tame; it is an unruly evil, full of deadly poison.’ Dabhoiwala points out that the saying ‘while sticks and stones may break my bones, words can never hurt me’ is first recorded only in 1862, but the contrary ...”

“... Kauffman were friends, while the younger Cosway began her career, as her critical friend James Northcote wrote, ‘filled with the highest expectations of being … another Angelica Kauffman’. Le Brun and Cosway coincided several times in Paris, where Cosway cut a lesser figure. She was scathing in her diary about her French rival, who probably had ...”

“... of key religious figure such as Stephen Marshall, Cornelius Burges, John Goodwin, Edmund Calamy, Henry Burton and others. They flit tantalisingly through the pages of Valerie Pearl’s valuable study of the London revolution of 1641, or Anthony Fletcher’s equally important analysis of petitioning on the eve of Civil War. It is no paradox to say that we are ...”

“... overcome a neurosis. He grew to the size of a Notre Dame linebacker, as the Harvard psychologist Henry Murray later estimated him, and his classmates learned to tolerate, even like him. Nicknamed ‘Father Abraham’ for his opinions on everything, and finally apprised of the fact that he would have to work if he was to excel, the sermonising Gymnasium ...”

“... seemed to imagine that common sense was socialism. As if all that were not enough, he thought Henry Miller was an outstanding novelist. As judicious (though not hopelessly balanced) accounts, the new biographies by Gordon Bowker and D.J. Taylor confirm what the law of averages might have led one to suspect: some of this is true, some of it questionable ...”

“... One from 1965 named Prell after its central component, a very green shampoo, was well described by James Schuyler: A dozen bottles of Prell – that insidious green – terrible green roses and grapes, glass dangles like emeralds, long strings of green glass beads, a couple of strands looped up. Under glass, in the centre, a blue-green pietà, sweating an ...”

“... good against the excesses of private gain. His ancestors include such muckraking journalists as Henry Demarest Lloyd, whose Wealth against Commonwealth told the sordid tale of Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company, as well as politicians such as William Jennings Bryan, Robert La Follette and even (for a while) Woodrow Wilson, whose New Freedom campaign of ...”

“... The legend goes that Yardley’s operation was closed down by Hoover’s secretary of state, Henry Stimson, who supposedly said: ‘Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail.’ What a nice sentiment. Of course, there’s no evidence that he said any such thing, and the moment the Cipher Bureau was shut in 1929 its files were transported from New York to ...”