“... of denunciatory Black Books, but it was a fact of public life, and nowhere was the practice more honoured than in the Church of England. Was it really a bad thing? The Passing of Barchester examines in fine focus the case of a 19th-century Dean of Canterbury, William Rowe Lyall, himself childless, who found Church appointments for his younger ...”

“... of President Kennedy’, which says that the assassinated idol of the Western world was little more, though certainly no less, than a rampant penis. The number and variety of his sexual activities (remarkable in view of his back troubles) left him open to blackmail by J. Edgar Hoover, he accepted a Pulitzer award for a book he didn’t write, his ...”

“... two writers never met; but both had become something of a cult. Hamilton died two years later in more than averagely gloomy circumstances, back on the bottle again; and most of his reputation went with him; but there were always the faithful who remembered and read him, and a few years ago his young man’s trilogy from the early Thirties, Twenty Thousand ...”

“... and persuades one of her friends to invite him to a salon so that she can meet him. But Herzog is more worldly than Ganna will ever be able to bring herself to believe. He’s charmed, at first, by her bookish eccentricities, but feels compelled to marry her only when he finds out that she comes with a dowry of eighty thousand crowns. He’s also sceptical ...”

“... name, the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) – turned into something much more ambitious: a comprehensive peace settlement for Europe. Two conferences in 1945, at Yalta and Potsdam, had tried to arrive at a postwar settlement but instead made plain major differences between the Soviets, on the one hand, and the British and ...”

“... first combustion engine motor-car service was introduced by the New Zealand Postal Service. For more than twenty-five years, the fate of the Lake Taupo was unclear. Then, in 1930, Jack Dennet, a farmer and amateur philatelist in Lincolnshire, discovered it in one of his old albums. Times were hard for English agriculture and Dennet was in trouble, having ...”

“... fluent, but over the years he has had his bookish successes, including a bestseller, and more than what, in the old days, would have been thought his fair share of women. The titles and dates of his works and conquests are recorded with bibliographic accuracy, and where necessary distinguished from other books with similar titles: thus his ...”

“... as well. It is hard to write about her even sympathetically without seeming hostile. The more a biographer tells – and the more she cares about her subject, the more she can tell – the worse the story sounds. Janet Todd has been a champion of Wollstonecraft for the length of ...”

“... earlier Science, Faith and Society (1946), maybe the later The Tacit Dimension (1966). ‘We know more than we can tell’ was Polanyi’s dictum. We know how to ride a bicycle, but we can’t write down how to do it, at least not in a way that allows non-cyclists to read our instructions, get on their bikes and ride off. We can reliably pick out a familiar ...”

“... under the waves. Roberts cites evidence that Redgrove’s ‘“cuddly” sessions with Nan were more than usually erotic’. He loved being wrapped in her skirts, and would be haunted by her sexual confessions and accounts of her menstrual tribulations. As he got older, Redgrove, conscious of Oedipal narratives, came to mythologise all this. He recalled his ...”

“... Ritz in Paris in January 1918 when he met the beautiful, patrician American divorcée Linda Lee Thomas at a breakfast marriage reception. Porter was living well at the time on ‘Grandfather’s tick’, as he called his inheritance; but Linda was ‘rich-rich’. She was eight years older than him, with fabled taste and impeccable manners, and counted ...”

“... sex, are entitled to peculiar honours.’ In August, the ‘Retrospect’ was prepared to be more generous, conceding that ‘the superior taste and talent which has been displayed by the females of the present age, in the various departments of the fine arts, is universally admitted.’ Even if it was universally admitted, the success of women in the ...”

“... paintings (especially the Madonna della Sedia) and had been adopted in famous paintings by Thomas Lawrence and Ingres. Moreover, the style of Brown’s painting owes nothing to Botticelli. It does, however, owe something to the example of Van Eyck’s Arnolfini portrait, with its central convex mirror, which had been acquired by the National Gallery in ...”

“... girth, he commanded a room. On one occasion in Berkeley, wind in his sails, he ranted on stage for more than four hours before Duncan walked out and the staff turned off the lights. Apparently Creeley would begin by making a statement or observation on which he proceeded to riff, taking it through all sorts of transmogrifications, before landing neatly back ...”

“... a small fortune in the art of ‘lending existence to nothing’, as Edmund Burke defined poetry. Thomas Hardy gave her the blurb of a lifetime when he said that the two greatest things about the United States were the skyscrapers and Edna St Vincent Millay. Her poems are still in print, and her famous lines still recognisable: ‘Euclid alone has looked on ...”