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“... the soles of the man’s feet were burned with hot irons. In Ireland, the king’s apparatchik John Tiptoft condemned the Earl of Desmond to death for ‘horrible treasons’, then took custody of the victim’s two young sons, whom he summarily beheaded. Later, Tiptoft claimed everything he’d done had been ‘for the state’.In such an age, prudence ...”

“... in the work of such a friend of the United States. The exception is his use of the word ‘guy’ for blokes of whom he approves. Bill Clinton is ‘a great guy’, as is the Taoiseach John Bruton. Andrew Smith is ‘a nice guy’, and so is ...”

“... assembled by Richard Reynolds and introduced by George Orwell. The first pamphlet in the book is John Knox’s First Blast of the Trumpet (1558), which begins: ‘To promote a woman to beare rule, superioritie, dominion or empire above any realme, nation, or citie, is repugnant to nature, contumelie to God, a thing most contrarious to his reveled will and ...”

“... for those words at the day of judgment.’ The Reformation itself is tackled by Alistair Fox and John Guy. Alistair Fox, in the opening essays of the book, discusses Humanism, previously the main dues ex machina of the teleological interpretation of the Reformation. In his dissection of the notion that there is ‘one coherent thing called ...”

“... exceptional wit and charisma, who brought the most powerful man in the country to his knees: as John Guy and Julia Fox describe her, ‘the confident, highly articulate woman with the dark flashing eyes’. It was the tempestuous love between Henry VIII and Anne, it’s said, that managed to topple papal power in England, and turn the country from ...”

“... England (S.T. Bindoff, 1950), England Under the Tudors (G.R. Elton, 1955), Tudor England again (John Guy, 1988), branding the age – see J.A. Williamson’s The Tudor Age (1953) – with the logo of the double rose of the dynasty which, conveniently, coincided with a generous 16th century of 118 years, 1485 to 1603. It is a good question how we would ...”

“... grasp, leaving him clutching the chestnut wig.’The same scene is described in the prologue of John Guy’s My Heart Is My Own, the latest biography of Mary Queen of Scots:And then the final twist. As the executioner lifted up the head, Mary’s auburn curls and white cap became detached from her skull. The illusion of monarchy was dissolved as the ...”

“... among them. The case against Cecil has recently been revived by Alford’s former supervisor, John Guy, in his biography of Mary, My Heart is my Own (2004). Any subsequent biographer is forced to address Guy’s case against Cecil. Alford has not done so explicitly, but he has accepted some of ...”

“... sofas in the 1950s had broken springs. Once they had buoyed up culture heroes like Rupert Brooke, John Cornford or Guy Burgess. Now, as we trudged across the great Gromboolian plain of the 1950s, they had given up the struggle. Modish undergraduates perched on the arms. Jonathan, new to the place, tried to sit down and slid ...”

“... court, thus restoring the element of personal interaction to politics, and to government too. John Guy and others subjected the ideology and praxis of the Cromwellian reforms to detailed scrutiny. Insofar as English government was reinvented, anticipating and partly realising the emergence of the state as a public thing, the whole credit was not ...”

“... was not brusqueness or rudeness – Ayckbourn testifies that Pinter was an extremely nice guy – but simply an absolute belief in the self sufficiency of the text.’ There’s not much hope for a biography whose subject can’t be brusque or rude, and Billington’s relish for stereotypes doesn’t help us much either. This is a world of bedrocks ...”

“... its wry but persistent hopefulness, matches the shape and tint of present America.’ This was John Updike in 1961, saying of J.D. Salinger what critics since have been saying of John Updike: that here is a novelist uncannily responsive to the ‘personality’, if we can use the word, of his own culture. Updike, it has ...”

“... he set to work on a thriller, using as his models Alistair MacLean and the Travis McGee series by John MacDonald, which focuses on a happy-go-lucky investigator with a romantic code of honour. Grant’s first stab at a name for his hero was Franklin, but one day, in an Asda in Kendal, his wife watched him grab something from a high shelf and remarked that, if ...”

“... First came the monied retirees, who triggered off the real-estate boom (this is the background to John D. MacDonald’s underrated Condominium). Secondly, the mind-boggling sums of money generated by middle-class America’s insatiable appetite for prohibited cocaine. Thirdly, the invasion by criminal classes educated in villainy outside the US – in ...”

“... offered a reward of £10,000 for any information leading to the capture of the fleeing diplomats, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean. One morning the winding mechanism of my 35 mm camera jammed, and we called at a pub not far from Warminster, where I asked the publican if he would let me use his cellar, which I imagined would be totally dark, to cure the ...”