The book lacks a bibliography, but this hardly matters given Hannan's taste for talking off the top of his head. - Oliver Kamm

There is no diplomatic way of saying it but, in his journalism, [John] Pilger was a charlatan and a fraudster. And I use those terms in the strict sense that he said things he knew to be untrue, and withheld things he knew to be true and material, and did it for decades, for ideological reasons. If you know where to look, you’ll uncover his inspiration.

[On the Shakespeare authorship question] This isn't mere whimsy: it's calumnious bilge. It derives not from documentary evidence (there is none) but from dismay that the greatest figure of English letters was a commoner. In his history of this perverse idea, Contested Will, [James] Shapiro documents how it's rooted in an anti-democratic ethos. It’s also irrationalist. If you reject Shakespeare's authorship, you dispense with the methods of historical inquiry altogether. Not coincidentally, the prominent Oxfordian author Joseph Sobran was a Holocaust denier.

The principal Shakespeare claimant these days is not [Francis] Bacon but Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford. The case was launched on an indifferent public in a book called Shakespeare Identified in 1920 by a Gateshead schoolmaster with the unimprovable name of J Thomas Looney. Looney surmises from the plays certain attributes that the author of Shakespeare had and then alights on Oxford as possessing them. A small cult following was convinced, including Sigmund Freud.
Yet the search for documentary evidence yielded nothing.