“... the lovingly created detail’ – reference to six little photographs superimposed on drawings of James Stirling’s building for the Mappin and Webb site in the City of London – ‘as well as their scale that makes the listed buildings so important. Look at the replacement. Is somebody supposed to jump from this tower?’ It is an easy book to mock, but at ...”

“... James Purdy​ ’s literary career comes with its own creation myth. He had been making no headway until in 1956 Edith Sitwell read a privately printed book of his stories and, ravished, threw herself into finding him a publisher and an audience. In one version of the event, Don’t Call Me by My Right Name, the book Purdy sent from America to Italy, made the last stage of its journey supernaturally, materialising by Sitwell’s bedside when she woke from a nap ...”

“... party, came dressed as Henry VIII and fed lion meat to his guests. Back in the mutinous 1960s, James Baldwin promised a ‘fire next time’. But the fire this time comes in cool, ironic novels like Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities. When Oliver Stone released his satirical movie Wall Street, the business press embraced the slick financial ...”

“... saying that the only VC awarded to an Ulsterman during the war had been won by a Catholic, James Magennis. One of the people on the panel, his boss, came back at him in a dull stupid rigid voice: ‘I happen to know he only got the Victoria Cross because he happened to be a Catholic.’ That combination of bigotry, crassness and sheer thick ignorance ...”

“... colonial past. Time was a source of conflict for the early inhabitants of the English colonies. James I, Charles I and Archbishop Laud held that the Sabbath should serve as a day for diversion as well as for worship. The Book of Sports, a set of regulations for Sundays and Holy Days issued by James in 1618, decreed ...”

“... Baroness James, making a rare visitation to a blighted metropolitan zone, downriver of Tower Bridge, has written a very useful book, a book on which I will be happy to draw for years to come. That was back in 1972. Title? The Maul and the Pear Tree; co-authored by T.A. Critchley of the Police Department at the Home Office, where James then earned her crust as a Principal in the Criminal Policy Department ...”

“... at Harvard, that Cambridge was still thought of as the home of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and James Russell Lowell, both recently deceased, and that across the river was a Boston which still called itself ‘the Athens of America’. Edward Cummings, the father, was a man of modern outlook, if only in certain respects. A sociologist who had been at ...”

“... his writing, and we are told that Emerson kept a print of Vesuvius in eruption in his front hall at Concord all his life. More than once, Richardson makes claims for Emerson as a sort of closet Dionysus, quoting from his journal: ‘O Bacchus, make them drunk, drive them mad, this multitude of vagabonds, hungry for eloquence, hungry for poetry, starving ...”

“... staff at Los Alamos, recruited even before he got his bachelor’s degree. His roommate Ted Hall was the second youngest staff member. Hall was also one of the three known Russian spies at Los Alamos. Of course, the chemist James Conant, who was president of Harvard, had been one of ...”

“... of the King Edward potato, adding perfunctorily that it was not ‘an eating potato’. Henry James would have seen the point. In 1870 he wrote to his elder brother William from Malvern, England, where the hotel fed him mostly on mutton and potatoes, to say how much he missed ‘unlimited tomatoes & beans & peas & squash & turnips & carrots & corn – I ...”

“... speaker. Poor fellow, I thought, facing those three. I read on. The poor fellow was revealed to be James Woolsey, a former director of the CIA. I knew nothing about him. I googled his name and found out that in July Woolsey had called on the US to bomb Syria. My stitches started hurting again. I didn’t have time to catch my breath: the driver told me to pick ...”

“... growing youth audience. Right,’ he says, only to drop the bomb that he rejected as clients both James Dean and Elvis Presley. His prose is acrylic – swift and vivid. Clients are ‘mutts’, the editor of the Hollywood Reporter is a ‘mobbed-up blackmailer’, a ‘night-crawling crud’. Underneath the pyrotechnical display – Clancy enjoys juicing up ...”

“... which there was little on view belonging to the 20th century, except perhaps the telephone in the hall and Country Life on the side table.Until about 1970 such a taste was also defined by its aversion to anything Victorian. Despite this, the ambition among collectors to surround themselves so completely with creations of past ages had begun in the homes of ...”

“... Biafra through Kissinger in South Africa (HK to Vorster: ‘I’m only here for De Beers’) via James Goldsmith, Robert Maxwell, Rupert Murdoch, to Mugabe, Bush and Blair. For fans of a pensionable age, Verwoerd’s assassination (‘A Nation Mourns’, 17 September 1966) is a star cover. Younger readers may prefer a ghoulish photo of Norman Tebbit, the ...”

“... have now been revised, expanded and tightened – although the speculative tone of the lecture-hall has been appropriately retained. Many other scholars have recently explored the development of the Church of England over the two long reigns of Elizabeth I and James I, and one of Collinson’s achievements, executed with ...”