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“... of nakedness, anticipated by a decade or so the Ginsberg party trick that shocked John Lennon and George Harrison at the dawn of Swinging London. When I interviewed one of the Six Gallery poets, Michael McClure, in 2011, he recalled earlier episodes of Dionysian frenzy with Gerd Stern and a thrash of ‘belly dancers and bongo drums’. Nights that were much ...”

“... The inquest on Charles Bravo in 1876 lasted a month and provided his parents’ solicitor, George Lewis, with the national celebrity which made him the upper classes’ favourite, and most expensive, legal confidant. In 1865, Sir James Willes wept as he sentenced Constance Kent to death for suffocating her little brother and hiding his body in the ...”

“... valuable and heartfelt than hearing the news or reading the paper, listening to Hank or Waylon or George and knowing that we are all part of the world’s heartbreak, its loss and disappointment mapped out in the songs of Hank and Waylon and George The effect of a refrain given by the indentation here perhaps ...”

“... and her imaginary husbands in the Steventon marriage register, for which her father, the Rev. George Austen, was responsible (both ‘Henry Frederic Howard Fitzwilliam of London’ and ‘Edmund Arthur William Mortimer of Liverpool’ feature as husband to ‘Jane Austen of Steventon’).In January 1796, Austen wrote to Cassandra about Thomas Lefroy, the ...”

“... all ‘a dedicated group of happy-go-lucky enthusiasts, who ought not to be bossed about’? Sir George Mallaby, however thick the velvet of his gloves, was trained enough to want to keep things a bit tidy. Indeed Lees-Milne did feel that Mallaby was too ready to give way to government – ‘typical of the Civil Service mind, which is perfectionist’, as ...”

“... more than enough free-floating material to pad out tome after fresh tome on Graham Greene, or George Orwell, or P.G. Wodehouse, or Evelyn Waugh, or Bernard Shaw, or Cyril Connolly? Must we prepare our shelves for yet another cache of letters, stumbled across like Dead Sea scrolls, every decade? If so, will they, too, rank high with biographers as ...”

“... invaded Kuwait. American foreign policy had gone into furious tilt and O’Malley was not playing ball. The thing to do is to concentrate, as O’Toole does, not on how the decision to issue export credit insurance fell apart, but on how it was made (by Albert Reynolds, against the advice of his civil servants); increased (by Reynolds at the behest of Larry ...”

“... social dominance. As jester or as sage, he was loldly above the fray and yet mysteriously on the ball. Another winning formula, and Lewis traces its drawing-room effects in ardent detail. The kind of people Connolly most wanted to impress, and did impress, were the kind of people who wrote lots of determinedly well-written letters. Lewis is skilful in his ...”

“... so utterly sincere’. But for a readership which had learned to revere Harriet Beecher Stowe and George Eliot, the effect was chilling. Stoddard’s power is more evident in her stories than the novels. Her pitiless strategies acquire an even sharper edge without the need to cope with the complexities of a sustained plot. First published in various New York ...”

“... be, for instance about the exaggerated account of Henry VIII’s consistency recently provided by George Bernard, and his keen eye ranges over a rich variety of sources, both visual and literary. There are more little slips in the text than there should be. My fear of confirming a reputation as a joyless pedant restrains me from rounding them up, with the ...”

“... chatted to the soon to be redundant staff. Others encouraged a yappy terrier to chase a tennis ball across the stretches of empty carpet where the display cases used to be. Most of us did as we had always done and leafed through books and put them down again: men who, perhaps like those in the fetish shop across the street, had deep and almost unreachable ...”

“... for McCartney’s new lockdown solo album; various reflections on the fiftieth anniversary of George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass; various reflections on the fortieth anniversary of John Lennon’s death; a trailer for Peter Jackson’s new Beatles documentary, Get Back; a new documentary about Mark David Chapman; an article trailed as ‘the inside ...”

“... in North Sea grey, brooding like a Calvinist’s conscience over the city that started off as King George’s Gulag and still struggles to shake off the mighty influence of a minor archipelago on the other side of the world. A glance tells you more than you want to know about Our Bridge. It’s a solid job; it almost bankrupted its British builders, Dorman ...”

“... see them dress up together, him in white tie and tails, for some evening event, often a charity ball, but I doubt whether they ever took the floor together; I imagine that she danced all night while he sat talking. There were some things they did together, including, she later told me, often making love (‘I can’t complain about him on those ...”

“... abandoning the chronological approach of his earlier volume for one that often keeps only one ball in the air at a time. Maybe that solution was hard to avoid, but it deprives his second volume of some of the grand narrative sweep of the first. It also bars the reader from a sense of the accumulation of difficulties felt by the Prime ...”