“... with the star (called ‘Jean Shaw’ and a compound of Veronica Lake, Bette Davis and Loretta Young) revives dangerous nostalgia for Hollywood’s clear-cut moralities:   ‘And I remember – I don’t know if it was that picture or another one – you shot the bad guy. He looks at the blood on his hand, looks down at his shirt. He still can’t ...”

“... alive and around at the time. I discovered that even this could be fudged in some standard works. Robert Payne is an acknowledged expert on Russian affairs, author of Dostoyevsky: A Human Portrait, The Image of Chekhov, The Three Worlds of Boris Pasternak. The Life and Death of Lenin (1964) runs to 672 pages. I returned to it to check the death toll in the ...”

“... Karl Löwith were beginning to work through the Weberian legacy, and Heidelberg was home also to a young American called Talcott Parsons, who later presented his own straitjacketed, functionalist version of Weber to an American public, with whom it proved immensely influential – a version that was re-exported back to post-war West Germany as the intellectual ...”

“... per cent for the socialist Lionel Jospin, 19 per cent for Chirac and 8 per cent for the Communist Robert Hue. Ten years ago, on the same measure, the Front received 8 per cent of working-class support. Only 30 per cent of Le Pen’s voters see themselves as belonging to the Far Right. Another 23 say simply that they are of the Right, while 29 per cent believe ...”

“... activity surrounding live performances and dance clubs also has an impact on the economy, as young people juggle their Giros to ensure a Saturday night out. The other lunchtime I heard a Portishead song being played in Spud-U-Like, and every weekend since 1988 motorway service stations on the M6 and M62 have been haunted by clubbers who spend the nights ...”

“... Like other tales, ‘Taman’ borrows from the essentials of Gothic without using its atmosphere. Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘Olalla’, on the other hand, uses every item in the Gothic book, combining Scottish diablerie with an old Spanish setting of changeless sloth and superstition, a time-warp in which the intruder’s romantic love is desolated by the ...”

“... of ‘one life, one writing’, although not at all in the proudly psychopathic sense in which Robert Lowell threw off that phrase. Few writers can have been less disturbed in the psyche than Mrs Gaskell, and the fact suggests the uncomfortable old cliché that virtue and good writing hardly ever go together. With her heart in the right place she wrote ...”

“... Josef Frolik, a Czechoslovak defector, who said Owen was on a £500 monthly retainer organised by Robert Husak, another intelligence officer at the Czechoslovak embassy in London. Owen, Frolik said, had been passing secrets to the Czechoslovaks since 1954. During his trial at the Old Bailey, Owen acknowledged receiving money but denied that he had given away ...”

“... High’s Latinate period, which – though the school was an ancient foundation and claimed Robert Henryson, the ‘Scottish Chaucer’, among its early masters – occurred circa 1935. The headmaster, whom I encountered face to face only once, had MA Cantab after his name and wore a black cloak that, though every teacher had one, gave him an especially ...”

“... of her counsellors are kept, and where readers are greeted by a 19th-century statue of the svelte young empress, are filled with reports annotated in her hand. Few matters were beneath her notice, from which bed to put in an archduke’s bedroom to the precise wording of clauses in international treaties. She could be pragmatic. Although she campaigned ...”

“... crow into national bard; there were theoreticians of ‘original composition’ like Edward Young, who set a premium on the rejection of classical models; there were book-trade entrepreneurs whose huge poetry anthologies cashed in on the landmark case of Donaldson v. Becket, which more or less destroyed copyright law; there were the pioneering academics ...”

“... necessaries of life’; the ‘idle’ poor, who could but wouldn’t work; and the old, ill or young who were ‘impotent’ and therefore deserving. In all three categories there were people who navigated what has been called the ‘makeshift economy’ and ‘mixed economy’ that underpinned welfare: charity, loans, pawn shops, casual ...”

“... intermarriage. Susannah Wedgwood, Charles’s mother, suffered much from boils and bad skin when young. Her father, Josiah, dragged her up to Liverpool for a saltwater bath, a modish therapy. Susannah stoutly resisted the prescription, spending her time playing in the street until she smashed her head on a paving stone. So her father left her at a riverside ...”

“... yet consigned to the skip two excellent earlier Lives, A.N. Wilson’s Hilaire Belloc (1984) and Robert Speaight’s The Life of Hilaire Belloc (1957). If a debunker were needed for this wittily bellicose (‘Bellocose’, Wilson suggests) Catholic author of more than 150 publications (which smacks of thraldom to the work ethic some call the Protestant ...”

“... for some of the most elegant landscapes designed in early Georgian England. In Evelyn’s own day, young trees were more usually shipped from Holland. I come from what D.J. Taylor has called the ‘pavement-pounding’ school of biography, perhaps particularly because buildings and landscape have been my preoccupation for so long. When I was researching my ...”