“... Snows of Kilimanjaro. Some of the best directors she worked with – Albert Lewin, George Cukor, John Huston – tried to locate what they felt was the private, natural quality in her so as to catch it on film. But Gardner, who had been obviously shy when she was young, was still secretly shy when older, and even oddly shy before the camera. As a ...”

“... Boston, is as much an expression of his taste and enthusiasm as of those of its doyenne, Isabella Stewart Gardner. He was not exaggerating when he told his 50th Harvard class reunion that most of the Italian pictures of any merit that had come to America between 1895 and 1940 had had his ‘visa stamped on their passport’. His protégés and epigones remain ...”

“... oratory which passes from Burke and Sheridan to Henry Grattan. Like his compatriot Charles Stewart Parnell, he took this reformist rhetoric into the highways and byways, as a street-corner speaker. There was nothing of the armchair socialist about him: he spent six years as a district councillor, serving on a number of committees from electricity and ...”

“... Under family pressure to marry – his mother, Cosima, was 78; his sister, Eva, married to Houston Stewart Chamberlain, remained childless – Siegfried proposed to Winifred. She accepted: ‘I entrust myself body and soul to you, guide me through life – shape me as you would have me!’ The young bride was admitted to the composer’s dysfunctional ...”

“... society which was monochrome, buttoned-up and circumscribed, but fundamentally benign and (to use John Major’s celebrated phrase) ‘at ease with itself’. That ease was, of course, predicated on the exclusion and silencing of certain social groups: there are almost no people of colour in Ealing films – or in many British films of the 1950s, for that ...”

“... Davitt and his Land League only got a look in because they represented a headache for Charles Stewart Parnell. History was Daniel O’Connell, Parnell and John Redmond, who led the Irish Parliamentary Party in Westminster after Parnell. My grandfather had been interned after the 1916 Rising, and sometimes when the older ...”

“... Between​ the wars, the journalist Richard Usborne recalled in 1953, there was a feeling that John Buchan was good for you. ‘If not exactly the author set for homework, Buchan was certainly strongly recommended to the schoolboy by parent, uncle, guardian, pastor and master,’ he wrote in Clubland Heroes, a study of the thrillers he had enjoyed as a child ...”

“... writing, previously limited to a small but dedicated following among writers such as Richard Ford, Stewart O’Nan and Michael Chabon. This came ten years too late for Yates, who died of emphysema and complications following minor surgery in 1992. His fiction is closely modelled on his own experiences and, perhaps unsurprisingly, it is a miserable place. The ...”

“... Cry (a Moorcock favourite), through his love for his cousin Rosie and his spiky relationship with John Barbican Begg, developer and despoiler, global media tycoon. Revelations, betrayals, shifts of fortune, seductions, conspiracies, keep the fingers flicking over the pages. Dead on cue, after some cunningly weighted rhetorical passage, a jibe at ‘Pretty ...”

“... This last week I finish reading Common Ground by Rob Cowen and The Places In Between by Rory Stewart, both books about wildernesses, Stewart’s in Afghanistan, Cowen’s in almost comical contrast in and around Harrogate. As he tells the story Stewart seems in regular peril of his ...”

“... Plays, paintings (famously Delaroche’s Execution of Lady Jane Grey), new editions of John Lingard’s revisionist History of England, as well as Pugin’s architectural manifesto Contrasts, all treated it as the determining event in national history. The facts were fiercely argued and at a popular level there was much debate about whether or not ...”

“... one thought it odd that the real inner cabinet not only did not include the Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott, but comprised four spinners and only two responsible ministers. As Rawnsley points out, the curious thing about Blair is that, however much he wants to reject ideology, he is also endlessly eager to explain himself, to insist that there is a big ...”

“... oddity of real life in places. Snow was Johnson’s second husband; she was married first to Neil Stewart, a drifting leftist would-be journalist, who toiled to produce a history of Chartism and didn’t make any money. They had two children and then she had one son with Snow. Marriage to C.P. Snow sounds ghastly, although Johnson determinedly loved and ...”

“... has anyone else, much, in the 36 years since Shaw’s death, except the predicted biographers. St John Ervine skimmed their scandalous cream in his ill-tempered centenary life in 1956. Other scholars have browsed them for background material, notably Norman and Jeanne MacKenzie in their book The Fabians. But it has taken until now for any publisher to be ...”

“... in 1781, and that of the 5000 inhabitants exposed to infection, 99.5 per cent caught the disease. John Enders and his young associate T.C. Peebles were the first to grow measles virus in the test tube in 1954, using the tissue culture techniques developed by Enders and his colleagues in the late 1940s. Much good that did him at Harvard. Even though he was ...”