“... of superiority to fashion, publicity, even print itself. Sterne affected no such loftiness. Ian Campbell Ross’s new biography provides an introductory cameo of Sterne’s triumph of self-marketing. He made himself available to his admirers, the measure and embodiment of his fictional imagination. After a week he was writing home to say he was ‘engaged ...”

“... have to satisfy the demands of the all-powerful and long-serving head of CIA counter-intelligence, James Jesus Angleton, who has recently died. The undeniably brilliant Angleton was also at least half-crazy. He saw moles everywhere and had paralysed the CIA for years on end with his frenetic witch-hunting. (One CIA officer wrote a bitter report suggesting that ...”

“... of Oxford often unsettled the Presbyterian certainties of the Balliol Scotch; Archibald Campbell Tait, an exhibitioner of a previous generation, even ended up as the archbishop of Canterbury. As a Scottish Episcopalian, Lang had no Calvinism to shed, but he opposed the efforts of Oxford’s rising liberals to tidy up Christianity. He found Benjamin ...”

“... its threats to expose the identities and whereabouts of the two boys who had killed the toddler James Bulger and were now about to be released. Nothing in her decision turned on a confidential relationship – there was none – between the youths and the press: what mattered was the nature of the information and the risk it posed to their privacy and ...”

“... he worked mostly by letter, was Ellen Terry. And there were more actresses, among them Mrs Patrick Campbell, some married and some not. He had a taste for actresses, and for other distinguished women. He refused to follow the way of the world and ‘substitute custom for conscience’, but some thought his sexual preferences, however proper by his own ...”

“... their charm, like credits in early films which “introduce” Shirley Temple, Marilyn Monroe or James Dean. But they didn’t in the end quite merit selection.’) The book is organised thematically, and if it isn’t immediately clear why a piece in praise of cats comes under ‘Religion, Politics and Philosophy’ instead of, say, ‘Autobiography and ...”

“... striking him down, with Murdochian violence, when he contemplated the attractions of Mrs Patrick Campbell. He had flirted with other actresses, but did not carry the pursuit to its end; with Stella, his first Liza, he committed himself, but this pursuit also failed and she slipped from his grasp. Despite his theoretical contempt for ‘romantic’ love, he ...”

“... the war; Roger Sterling (John Slattery), the urbane old-money wit and rake who runs Accounts; Pete Campbell (Vincent Kartheiser), the spoiled, petulant, baby-faced young scion of neo-aristocratic New Netherlanders, also Accounts; and Joan Holloway (Christina Hendricks), who, from the position of senior secretary, makes partner and Accounts exec in her own ...”

“... for them. Recordings were designed to be accessible, but also to last. ‘From the Supremes,’ James Gavin writes, ‘Michael got his first taste of the catchy hooks and beats that made a pop song unforgettable.’ Or as Michael put it, ‘I knew how to make these records and make them jump out the radio.’In 1975, when Michael was twelve, his family ...”

“... its Columbus. Within a few decades this continent had been exploded, mostly by its anti-Columbus, James Cook, and crumbled into a multitude of islands in a vast ocean, mapped, measured and ready for invasion by beachcombers, traders, whalers, missionaries, colonial administrators and, in their wake, historians. The voyagers, equipped with scientists and ...”

“... except Donald Trump … would grant access to the editor of the National Enquirer.’The Blair/Campbell secular benediction ‘the People’s Princess’ was surprisingly more than a slogan: Diana pre-empted the media, the conduit to the people. She got over being described as a Pinner hairdresser, just as Kate Middleton had to put up with some crass digs ...”

“... and from the Society for the Education of Africans, founded by the Scottish missionary John Campbell. The African Academy would give its students a Christian education, with a particular focus on ‘industrial habits’ such as boat-building or welding that might prove useful in the development of the colony. Twenty boys were educated at the academy and ...”

“... by the Welsh Puritan Morgan Llywd, and a lament over the battle of Inverlochy by a woman from the Campbell clan. At times poems have a friendly responsiveness to each other; at other times they seem to fight across the pages. The Ranter Laurence Clarkson adopts the voice of Christ himself to rant heretical views on the Trinity (‘Though called God, yet that ...”

“... known as the Egoist), the Little Review and the Dial. His protégés, T.S. Eliot and James Laughlin, would bear the impress of his tastes when they edited the Criterion and the New Directions publishing house, respectively. But first Pound had to make a splash, along the lines of Roger Fry’s Post-Impressionist exhibition or Marinetti’s ...”

“... true to the period. The apple-cheeked and boyishly malevolent Vincent Kartheiser, as Pete Campbell, Draper’s Younger Rival in the firm, manages to steal every scene he enters. They are, paradoxically, the two actors who would seem most at home in a real 1960s Hollywood movie, yet play their roles with the kind of commitment that lifts them out of ...”