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“... stories to improve their own influence with the President and to reach him through the papers he read (like the Washington Times). Wanting to ‘let Reagan be Reagan’, Regan battled with the first lady to control the President’s schedule. But Nancy Reagan, as everyone now knows, had a trump in the Presidential protection game, a ‘friend’ who had ...”

“... to that of the Mignonette, down to the fact that its cannibal victim bore the same name as the Richard Parker of the real-life story. Simpson says the coincidences were noted at the time of the trial, and it is also said (I do not know how reliably) that Dudley happened to read Poe’s story during the voyage and might ...”

“... in government and the media tried to stop the publication of this book so that you could not read it. But now you can. Or at the very least, now you may. I telephoned the publicity department of HarperCollins to inquire who had tried, and how, to ‘stop the publication’ of Newt’s fruits. There was vagueness. I was referred downwards and sideways ...”

“... a group of locals, musical and devout. The next, song sheets were handed out, with music few could read, and we were expected to sing along. The New People’s Mass has ever since been rather a grim affair – a dreadful noise in the pits while the faithful work out where quavers go and what crotchets sound like. The change had been made in the name of the ...”

“... described as ‘lethargic and incapable of concentration’ and ‘who was eleven before he could read fluently and at twenty he wrote like a child’. Instead, Roberts shows us a youth, not brilliant perhaps, but of inexhaustible curiosity and diligence, who spoke decent French and German and was the first British monarch to study physics and chemistry. He ...”

“... as a fine traveller and considered Amurath to Amurath one of the best travel books she’d read, Freya was not ‘very fascinated by her as a woman’. At first sight, this judgment seems surprising. Throughout her active career as a traveller in the Middle East, Freya was compared with Gertrude Bell. Both women travelled in remote and dangerous ...”

“... Shakespeare ‘warbling his native woodnotes wild’ in ‘L’Allegro’. Rather than being read as the last inspired musings of a rustic bard dreaming beside his provincial fireside or dreaming of it, Cymbeline and The Winter’s Tale might simply have looked like symptoms of the courtly vogue for tragicomedy which had been spreading across Europe ...”

“... hosts is called Through the Looking-Glass, and its pilot episode features Jonathan Miller and Richard Gregory talking animatedly about mirrors and doubles, both of which figure prominently in A Whistling Woman’s own symbolic repertoire. (As she did in Babel Tower, where she brought on Anthony Burgess as a witness for the defence in her fictional ...”

“... It is also a work that only Defoe scholars – and perhaps not all of them – could ever bear to read. Defoe always fancied himself a poet. John Richetti notes that he wrote more lines of verse than either Milton or Dryden, though it is now almost all forgotten. ‘To some extent, that is a shame,’ Richetti observes, not quite believing that he is putting ...”

“... with charm) is particularly striking. Johnston ticks off ‘undergraduate atheists’ like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, who have doubtless noticed this correlation, and scolds them for their errors about Spinoza, but I find Dawkins and Hitchens (and Sam Harris) companionable, as I find Johnston himself, and feel no resultant ...”

“... distance, transforming audience and speaker into a common ‘we’. It didn’t surprise me to read that she spent a summer playing Cordelia before American audiences in a student touring production or that, as a child, she came second to Elizabeth Taylor for the lead role in National Velvet. When that gift for performance is combined with profound ...”

“... Richard Holmes published Shelley: The Pursuit in 1974. More than a decade later, in Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer (1985), he recalled how obsessive his engagement gradually became, not just with Shelley, but with that whole group of English expatriates associated with him, as it moved from Geneva through Italy – Bagni di Lucca, Este, Venice, Rome, Naples, Ravenna, Pisa – shedding some members and adding others, before finally disintegrating when Shelley and Edward Williams were drowned off Leghorn in July 1822 ...”

“... in October, during what the Israeli Army called its ‘incursion’ – a euphemism inherited from Richard Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia – into towns under the nominal jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority. Young men distributed dry sticks of olive wood to dip into a barrel of fire. In Arabic and English, white banners proclaimed ‘Jerusalem is also ...”

“... until ‘at the end, instead of a picture, you get a perfect blank.’ That ‘blank’ Bangs read, ‘of course’, as Harry’s face – his critique is far from free of the gruesome misogyny you often get from men on the subject of beautiful women. I don’t agree with him. What I see is a disco ball, dark streets, Studio 54 and the Twin Towers, like ...”

“... conceded. But they had all been ouflanked. ‘Não é pelos 20 centavos,’ one popular slogan read: ‘It’s not about twenty cents.’ Two million people were on the streets across Brazil, but the MPL, along with other left-wing movements, found itself pushed out. ‘Sem partido!’ the newcomers shouted at anyone bearing any discernible political ...”