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“... to Yingluck’s enemies. Her worst mistake, though, was a bill that would have delivered a broad amnesty for crimes associated with the political turmoil of the post-coup years. Among its beneficiaries would have been Abhisit, who has been charged with child murder in the aftermath of the 2010 crackdown on the Red Shirts – and at this even some of ...”

“... Richard Yates faced some formidable obstacles: a broken home, tuberculosis, rampant alcoholism, divorce (twice), lack of recognition and manic depression – a combination that sent him, as he put it, ‘in and out of bughouses’. Even his triumphs seemed only to cause further distress. Though his first novel, Revolutionary Road (1961), was a critical success, sales were wretched, and he spent most of his working life in its shadow ...”

“... In 1950 a venerable, once highly successful, long-ailing magazine quietly expired. Richard Usborne, the assistant editor in its dying days, later recalled an aficionado’s touching reaction. ‘When the Strand finally folded in 1950, my old sixth-form master wrote to me regretfully: “I loved the dear old Strand ...”

“... an inch of difference between Labour and Conservatives, the one-time counter-culture celebrity Richard Neville said long ago, but it is in that space that we live. The opening weeks of the first Labour Government for a generation have been a daily reminder of how far Neville’s aphorism still holds. So tirelessly had Tony Blair strained to ratchet down ...”

“... within it – and with a sense of humour entirely lacking in historical novelists.’ In London, Richard Ollard, an editor at Macmillan, was similarly impressed by O’Brian’s ‘originality, gusto and … really astonishing knowledge of the sources’. He was ‘a more than competent hand at characterisation’, Ollard, a former navy ...”

“... Perhaps. But the following things really happened. President Kennedy was shot down in the light of broad day. His assassin was murdered on camera while in maximum security. Richard Nixon’s intimates fed high-denomination dollar bills into a shredder in order to disguise their provenance in the empire of – Howard ...”

“... quotes in support of her case: Worlds against Worlds, with clashing Horror driv’n, Dash their broad Ruins to the Throne of Heav’n! Thro’ flaming Regions of the burning Air, Down rain distilling Suns, in liquid Rills, Mix’d with red Mountains of unmelted Fire! Hissing, perplex’d, with Show’rs of Icy Hills, And Cat’ract Seas, that roar, from ...”

“... public’s greed for the sensational and the exotic fuels it. The mandate of anthropology is so broad that it easily bursts the bounds of strict professionalism, despite academic attempts at containment. When I was elected to the Association of Social Anthropologists (about 1959), Meyer Fortes told me that it had been formed ‘to prevent people like ...”

“... for a split at 1815 and an end in the 1880s. So in choosing to conclude his new survey at 1880, Richard Price joins a long tradition of irreverent timekeeping. Except that, according to Price, it is not the 19th century that ends in the 1880s, but the ‘long’ 18th century. In recent years the lifetime of the distinctive political regime and social ...”

“... no easier to deal with now than we did in the time of the Ark. Talking it over continues this broad vein of enquiry. It asks the same nagging historical questions. How do we know what really happened? How can anyone, even someone who was there, say what it was really like? In this case, the event itself, the bit of history we are dealing with, is ...”

“... in which Mephistopheles encourages Faust to dance with her. The episode intrigued artists. Richard Westall exhibited Faust and Lilith at the Royal Academy exhibition in 1831. His Lilith is a naked, milky-skinned babe, with rosy-red lips and pert breasts, her modesty obscured by a piece of white fabric. Faust, needless to say, is fully clothed – in ...”

“... when new buildings rise, but these changes seem small in comparison with what does not change: the broad turns of the Grand Canal, the floor plan which the palaces built along it nearly all follow, the layout of streets and waterways.But as the people in the pictures change, so does one’s sense of the part the buildings play in their lives. Bellini’s black ...”

“... it difficult to award the palm to one or the other. Hobsbawm is the most erudite, scrupulous and broad-visioned of the social and economic historians who have done much in the last thirty years to uncover the long-neglected lower depths of popular history; Gash has seldom, and never at length, strayed from the more ancient high road of Parliamentary and ...”

“... the rationalisations. This script could certainly have made a good film: it was intended for Richard Lester in 1982, but ‘the finances were never found.’ The other three film scripts have become real movies. One of them, The Comfort of Strangers, is another macabre: it adapts Ian McEwan’s novel about an Italian sadist and his subservient wife ...”

“... material for biographers and Patton has had a dozen already, to say nothing of a film that brought Richard Nixon great consolation during the lonely watches of the Watergate nights. Only Erwin Rommel can match Patton in the publicity stakes, and he was a very much duller man. For the British, Patton may have been a minor if spectacular figure in World War ...”