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“... in the previous history of womankind.’ Opposition came, strangely, from the liberal scientist Thomas Henry Huxley. In reply to a telegram from Herbert Spencer asking support for the burial, Huxley wrote:   It can hardly be doubted that the proposal will be bitterly opposed, possibly with the raking up of past histories, which had better be ...”

“... made cases for the prosecution or the defence, in which Pacelli features as a monster or a saint. Gordon Thomas’s account of Pacelli’s response to the Final Solution, for instance, is a tendentious exercise in exculpation and hagiography that implausibly depicts Pacelli as a papal pimpernel, actively masterminding a campaign to save European ...”

“... R. George Thomas is a cautious man. His life of Edward Thomas (no relation) is ‘a portrait’ not ‘a biography’. Maybe this is just as well. The poet was a cautious man too. He was also a scrupulous one, and when we read in the first few pages that research for this book began ‘in the early 1960s’, we are encouraged to feel that author and subject are kindred spirits ...”

“... Eliot’s poetry was rooted in private aspects of his life has now been accepted,’ says Lyndall Gordon in the Foreword to her second volume of biographical rooting among these aspects. This acceptance, which she evidently approves, has undoubtedly occurred, as a root through the enormous heap of books about the poet, now augmented by the centenary of his ...”

“... is from. He discusses the work of writers from a great variety of backgrounds: Brian Moore, Mary Gordon, Thomas McGonigle and Michael Stephens. Stephens’s work, he says, is best read alongside that of the African-American Trey Ellis, the Latina Sandra Cisneros and the Scot James Kelman, rather than other ...”

“... rule of law.’ Tell that to the shades of Lord Mansfield, whose house the mob burnt during the Gordon riots, or to Thomas More as he went to the block. Critical comment on contemporary questions is presented ex cathedra, as in this extreme example: ‘It is sometimes suggested that instead of a jury of 12, there should ...”

“... provided American revolutionists with a schema. The pervasive influence of Country publicists like Thomas Gordon, John Trenchard, Bolingbroke and Benjamin Hoadly on colonial pamphleteers is now taken for granted. American historians have tested Bailyn’s thesis by extending and particularising it. This is what T.H. Breen has done in Tobacco Culture. The ...”

“... Material Place – ‘All men say “What” to me,’ Emily Dickinson wrote in a letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson. She certainly mystified Higginson. He never entirely overcame his uneasiness about her odd, disjunctive words and bewildering epistolary tones and seven years into their correspondence still complained of being unable to get beyond the ...”

“... might have found coverage of their coup overshadowed by the downfall of the prime minister (in Gordon Brown’s dreams). When politicians fall, it’s in everyone’s interest that they fall hard; Kennedy’s suggestion that he stand for re-election was never going to go down well. At least he’s now free to write his memoirs, though they won’t be a ...”

“... a poll published in the Independent in January, Labour would do better at a general election under Gordon Brown’s leadership. Never mind the good of the country: if Blair really cared more about his party staying in government than about himself staying in Number Ten, he wouldn’t still be ...”

“... Street crash, witnesses the rise of Nazism in Berlin (where he attends parties with Fritz Lang and Thomas Mann), and arrives in Hollywood just in time to fall foul of McCarthyism. Any Human Heart (2002) is narrated by Logan Mountstuart, an English author who knocks about Oxford and London with the likes of Cyril Connolly and Henry Green, reports on the Spanish ...”

“... as get sacked, but it would be rash of the prime minister to wait for the electorate to sack him: Gordon Brown wouldn’t be the only disappointed person were Tony Blair to be succeeded by Michael Howard. Caracalla was succeeded by Macrinus, a co-conspirator of Martialis, the man who did the actual stabbing and was shortly afterwards caught and ...”

“... he’s as likely as not in the toilet, not snorting cocaine as everyone thinks but throwing up. Gordon Bannach, a reporter at the Daily News, is determined to destroy Fleming’s career, which he does with a bit of help from a researcher fatale calling herself Abbi Pascoe – real name Tanya Griffiths – and Lawrence Castle’s senior spin doctor, who was ...”

“... researchers. The first thing we hear from him is a phatic murmur delivered into a faulty radio: ‘Thomas? Luke? Come in? This is Doc. Hello, hello. Thomas? Luke? Hello?’ After this, he communicates by non-verbal means – ‘making a face, like: what time do you call this, lads?’ We’re given a few snatches of reported ...”

“... think like other people!’ Percy Florence was unusual in a uniformly cerebral family. Charlotte Gordon’s premise for writing a dual biography of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley is that while their lives overlapped only for ten days, they shared a spirit. Wollstonecraft’s work – especially her treatise on education and A Vindication of the Rights ...”