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“... by other means.What he longed for was the perfect prince. He spent his life looking for a true ‘gentleman’ politician to whom he could offer his services. He thought he had found one in Nelson Rockefeller, the New York governor, his first big political backer. Rockefeller was born into money and social influence, and tried to win the presidency as a ...”

“... the railroads, was a gambler, a drinker, a bully, a glutton and a spitter – in other words, a ‘gentleman of the old Virginia school’. His children kept pet billy goats and played tennis and squash on their own courts. Nancy’s older sister Irene was the more celebrated beauty – she was the original Gibson Girl – but Nancy was fiercer (she once ...”

“... he told her, it was his library that he missed and longed to see again. Yet the old Viennese gentleman could not bring himself to enter the flat in which he had grown up. His daughter, born in Palestine, remembers him in his hat and coat, unable to speak. ‘We stood downstairs in the courtyard, and my father pointed at the apartment where they lived. A ...”

“... 11 January. It’s not to disparage David Bowie, but if even a fraction of the tributes being paid to him and his influence were true we would never have had a Conservative government or indeed any government at all. Hearing the news on the Today programme this morning R. nearly cries. I met Bowie only once, at John Schlesinger’s sometime in the 1980s, and remember him as a slight, almost colourless figure, who was somehow Scots ...”

“... those which see the ‘toady’, the upstart ‘Butcher’s boy’ who betrayed that he wasn’t a gentleman even in his manner of being drunkenly sick (he did it into Talfourd’s pocket at the Garrick), and those which see a bully: there is a good story of how Forster’s butler ‘when told that his home was on fire, served dinner in nervous silence before ...”

“... tavern wall into an elegantly executed image of sufficient sophistication to find its way into a gentleman’s library. Bewick perfected a method of working against the grain on hard boxwood. By combining the use of an engraving tool which was usually used for copperplate work with the much harder wooden surface, Bewick produced blocks which achieved ...”

“... to do so. Born in 1873 among the lush hills and greenery of Winchester, Virginia, to a feckless gentleman farmer and his beautiful Southern belle wife, she was removed from the landscape she loved at the age of nine, when the family moved to the harsh, flat, frozen prairie town of Red Cloud, Nebraska. This, the first rude trauma of Cather’s life, was ...”

“... I read it in Heinemann’s Best Short Stories, the annual selection edited by Giles Gordon and David Hughes. I made a mental note of the author’s name, Helen Dunmore, because I’d never heard of her before. A name to watch for, I thought, and watched for it in The Best of Best Short Stories, 1986-95. Dunmore was not included, which I thought a puzzling ...”

“... Roger Williamson was burned to death at Zandvoort in 1973, while his friend and fellow driver David Purley tried desperately to beat out the flames as millions of TV viewers watched, Lauda was asked by the press why he hadn’t stopped to help. ‘I’m paid to race,’ he said, ‘not to stop.’ The ‘formula’ of F1 refers to the various rules ...”

“... when Percy was the most successful tragedy of the time, and her closest friends were the actor David Garrick and his wife, Eva, was the cause of some dismay to sober-minded Evangelicals. But Roberts had an answer to that. He was not offering ‘a perfect specimen of Christianity’, but an account of a heroic triumph: More had mixed with the society ...”

“... another example of ‘to fire out’ meaning what it is here taken to mean, and I notice that David and Ben Crystal, in their new glossary Shakespeare’s Words,* do not admit the venereal sense, giving only ‘to drive away by fire’. The poet is not even sure the parties have slept together, and could only have been certain of the consequence accepted ...”

“... him, however, and Watt was charged with high treason, along with an elderly goldsmith called David Downie, who was unfortunate enough to be at the meeting at which Watt disclosed his crackpot plan. The government was keen to persuade the jury and public opinion (though it was certainly not true) that the Edinburgh plot was part of a co-ordinated ...”

“... to deliver much more than formulaic world-weariness, a drone like a miraculously articulate David Hockney impersonator. Jonathan Meades does this schtick so much better, performs himself with lip-smacking relish. Gossip has its charms, but not when it’s dragged out over three interminable evenings with animated postcard footage re-used to the point of ...”

“... habitual academic delivery, one baulks at this stilted sentence: ‘You may be ever so much of a gentleman and a privy councillor, but if you have a daughter you cannot be secure of immunity [my italics] from that petty bourgeois atmosphere...’ This is exceptional and no worse than Hingley’s maladroit update in ‘Murder’: ‘Mother’s breast is ...”

“... Tuscan realism.’ Much of the story is dominated by hunger. Pinocchio dreams of being a gentleman with ‘a cellar of liqueurs and cordials, and shelves full of candied fruit, cakes, dessert breads, almond cookies and wafers topped with whipped cream’, but his real life is one in which a dish of cauliflower dressed with oil and vinegar, given to ...”