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“... an exaggerated relish that suggests insecurity. In this, he was unlike the much tougher A.J.P. Taylor, who came to Oxford from middle-class Lancashire and was able to view the place with affectionate detachment. Taylor got on sturdily with his work. Trevor-Roper let himself be drawn into energy-sapping college ...”

“... Ross Perot called Lin an ‘egg roll’. She was compelled to defend her design before Congress. A Frederick Hart statue of three soldiers was erected next to her memorial to appease the literal-minded. ‘It’s like Maya Lin all over again. But worse,’ a character in The Submission is made to say, without much subtlety, after the winner of the blind ...”

“... who weighed only 15 pounds. It had been the idea of the Victorian freak show impresario Phineas Taylor Barnum to present him in the guise of ‘General Tom Thumb’. Before long, the general’s imitations – ‘in full military costume’ – of Napoleon Bonaparte and Frederick the Great, and a varied repertoire ...”

“... at, and at worst hold up as criminal? Would amateurs with the professional skills of James Murray, Frederick Furnivall, Richard Chenevix Trench – if they exist today – be foolish enough in this post-Thatcherite world to give away the fruits of their labour? Why slave to make future generations of OUP publishers rich? Nor, with the economic short-termism ...”

“... was dawning even as he wrote: he had the good fortune to live in an epoch – ‘the century of Frederick’ he called it – in which the promise of general Enlightenment could at last be fulfilled. He conceded that he did not yet live in ‘an enlightened age’; but thanks to his liberal Prussian king it was at least an ‘Age of ...”

“... the writings of an unlikely set of predecessors: Edmund Burke, the eccentric Jeffersonians John Taylor of Caroline and John Randolph of Roanoke, Old School Presbyterian defenders of slavery, T.S. Eliot, Karl Marx, Karl Barth, Reinhold Niebuhr, the Nashville Agrarians and their latterday apostles, Richard Weaver and Melvin Bradford. Liberals thus find ...”

“... volume, for instance, the most frequent recipient of his surviving letters is his publisher. Sir Frederick Macmillan, the letters to him deal mainly with matters of business and are not very informative about that ‘amazing old man’ (to use the phrase that Hardy applied to Verdi), the author of such very late poems as ‘He never expected much’. What ...”

“... like Blunt and Burgess? Certainly. But their loyalty and dedication to secrecy was such that until Frederick Winter-botham’s book, The Ultra Secret, appeared in 1974 none of the work at Bletchley was ever referred to in the press, and none of those who worked there ever sought to break their obligation to maintain secrecy. It was an agreeable organisation in ...”

“... time of Bitches Brew (leading to the film’s brutal dismissal of free-jazz artists such as Cecil Taylor, and cementing a regressive view of the jazz canon). Country Music stops in 1996, allowing Burns to skirt such subjects as the Dixie Chicks’ stand against the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and the subsequent, multi-year industry blacklist (along with the term ...”

“... Thompson have also explored these comparisons, the ‘opening’ of the West – even before Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis – has always been an important part of a self-congratulatory and inward-looking version of American national history. But it is not just American history that Belich seeks to locate in a broader, transcontinental ...”

“... Crachami had been exhibited at 22 New Bond Street in London. This was 20 years before Phineas Taylor Barnum arrived from America with Tom Thumb. The Times declared Crachami ‘unquestionably the most curious of all the dwarfish candidates for public favour that have visited this metropolis’. The ‘Brief Memoir’ in the 1824 exhibition pamphlet claims ...”

“... three miles west you’d fall off the earth. Then it passes, even as the cab heads up the hill to Frederick and turns right. Like a brief bout of nausea. Mother and Father would come to visit, at least during my first few years out here. Father liked the idea of the place. As a boy he’d been mad for Jack London and that author’s many youthful adventures ...”

“... neat malice! How, in their own fashion, well-written and truthful and honest they are!’ A.J.P. Taylor said that Channon’s ‘rank highest among the political diaries of the period: written, as all good diaries should be, by a man not ashamed to own his weaknesses, it recaptures perfectly the atmosphere of the 1930s.’ Reading the two diaries long ago, I ...”

“... and the first person in Tewkesbury to die as a result of the floods, 19-year-old Mitchell Taylor, had drowned while taking a short cut past the abbey on his way home from the pub. Passers-by heard him yelling for help – he couldn’t swim – and tried in vain, via mobile phone and the 999 centre, to guide a helicopter to him. His body was found a ...”