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“... by 1893: Mahan told an anxious British public what it most wanted to hear about its navy. Denis Mack Smith is another. His Cavour and Garibaldi, published in 1954, told many Italians what they did not want to hear, but told them at a special point in their history when they had no choice but to listen. Denis Mack Smith ...”

“... limitation of Patronage, Art and Society in Renaissance Italy is its concentration on Florence. Charles Mack’s magnificently-illustrated volume comes as a welcome reminder of the importance of other parts of Tuscany, as well as a spectacular example of what could be done by a patron who was in a position, unlike the patricians of Florence, to display ...”

“... syntax and the personification of abstract ideas (another of Wordsworth’s special hates). Robert Mack, properly enough, sets out to be Gray’s advocate and though not all his vindications of individual poems are persuasive, his biography does add an important consideration to our understanding of Gray’s poetic values, and therefore of his high status as a ...”

“... pronounced’ Theobald. Presumably following this lead, an equally distinguished Popian, Maynard Mack, has now in his long-awaited and richly-informative new Life of Pope found a corner in which to extend this editorial scepticism into his own full-blown critical observation: ‘Even the name of the hero dunce, Lewis Theobald, though printed out in full, was ...”

“... plantation. His mother, Julia, already had several children with Annye Anderson’s father, Charles Dodds, a barber and furniture-maker who had been forced off the acres he owned by a lynch mob, probably in 1909. Anderson mentions a knife fight with a white neighbour, apparently over a woman, though it was standard practice to run Black landowners off ...”

“... the first under the command of General Bismarck, the others commanded by Generals Manteuffel and Mack. Together they numbered nearly half a million men. General de Gaulle at the head of an army of 200,000 men proceeded to Nancy, which was being threatened by the first German army. Another French army, commanded by General de Boisdeffre and numbering 150,000 ...”

“... may often be a substitute for, not a summons to, revolution. Rochester’s obscene ‘Satyr on Charles II’ was the work not of a puritan revolutionary but of a privileged fellow libertine, and Private Eye’s fascination with the alleged exploits of ‘Randy Andy’ hardly suggested that the British royal family was in danger from republican ...”

“... a good deal about the progress of his work and his passing moods. All this makes it possible for Charles Osborne to organise his new biography round generous quotations from the letters (some of which he has previously translated and published in a separate volume). It makes a readable narrative, packed with information. The chief drawback is the lack of ...”

“... the Provençal poet, is pretty dull. The book which best deserves reprinting is The Strang Life of Charles Waterton (1782-1865), a biography of the recklessly eccentric naturalist and taxidermist, published in 1949. Here was a rumbustious, unaffected figure whom Aldington could admire without reservation. Squire Waterton had a perfect contempt for social ...”

“... phrase in the unique Cobbian prose style). People not normally considered entirely admirable, like Charles II, Halifax or Talleyrand, are thus appreciated for their ‘human proportions’. Similarly, he finds politicians who are heavy eaters more sympathetic and reassuring figures than those who are dyspeptics or vegetarians. His letters often end with a ...”

“... United States, a large and powerful lorry is represented by the Sign for a bulldog – because Mack trucks, one of the great manufacturers, had that as their logo. What I shall emphasise later, however, is not words but grammatical structures. Sign is like a natural language (and unlike signed English) in that its own grammatical forms are evolving in ways ...”

“... his employer into new displays of political or artistic adventurousness. ‘We were never Mick and Mack,’ says Olivier in retrospect. He refused Tynan permission in the Seventies to write his biography or even a New Yorker profile of him, believing that he had betrayed confidences to a New York newspaper and perhaps aware of some of the disparaging things ...”

“... on its rerelease in February 1962. (‘The funniest film of all,’ the posters outside the Prince Charles Cinema in Leicester Square declared.) My own experience of being got away, by car from London to Cwm-yr-Eglwys on the north Pembrokeshire coast, at least found some relief towards its conclusion in the spectacle of the Port Talbot steelworks, a lattice of ...”