“... in Ulysses when he paired the Jewish commercial traveller Leopold Bloom with the young artist Stephen Dedalus, whose namesake is the Cretan master who designed that Iliad dancefloor.) Critics have often noted the Odyssey’s almost obsessive attention to luxury artefacts and crafted objects – a metapoetic nod to its own artistry – but also a ...”

“... among the trees, perched on an improbable cart waving a giant tooth above it. It belongs to Dr King Schultz, a German dentist turned bounty hunter, who wants to buy one of the slaves to help him identify felons. The actor is Christoph Waltz, who was so impeccably, horridly charming as a Nazi officer in Inglourious Basterds; here, as a whimsical ...”

“... aware of the problems but optimistic that they could be overcome,’ he said in an interview with Stephen Colbert. ‘The book is the story, perhaps, of how I was wrong about that … I couldn’t believe it was that bad … I thought it was possible to work with somebody. I thought surely they would want to learn about the complexity of arms control ...”

“... with sugared almonds. Donkeys shit sweet figs. The virtuous are disgraced, the debauched crowned king, the highest praise is saved for those who laze around eating liverwurst. ‘One only has to say, or even just to think: mouth, what do you want? Heart, what do you desire?’Antwerpers worried about whether their prosperity was diabolical. (It was: the ...”

“... to introduce the mandatory rotation of officers. Particularly outspoken on this matter were Adrian Stephen, Virginia Woolf’s brother, and his wife Karin, both of whom protested against the concentration of economic as well as transferential power in the hands of Jones and Glover. (As the best-known public representatives of psychoanalysis, they could control ...”

“... even a dead Enemy might bite back.) Still more complex was his relationship with Eliot. Professor King suggests that Eliot was for Read a father figure ‘whom he could emulate, rebel against and, at times, loathe’, and that seems about right. Eliot published Read’s poems, his essays, and some of his books about art, but at times was sharply critical of ...”

“... The picture that emerged was of a game without rules, played recklessly and with impunity by, as Stephen Kinzer characterises it, a ‘cast of obsessed chemists, cold-hearted spymasters, grim torturers, hypnotists, electr0-shockers and Nazi doctors’. With the publication in 1978 of Marks’s The Search for the Manchurian Candidate: The CIA and Mind ...”

“... telegraphing Lys to come and rescue him. The redoubtable Barbara, who had been the mistress of King Farouk, possibly contributed a germ of influence to the formidable figure of Pamela Flitton in Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time. Where such entanglements were concerned, Connolly was a comic masochist, not a tragic one; and in that sense very ...”

“... which Oxford-modern resolves by printing ‘busil’est’ – an emendation duly defended in Stephen Orgel’s excellent single-play Oxford version2 (‘my thoughts of Miranda are most active when I am busiest at my work’). The Oxford-original gives ‘busielest’ as what the compositor or possibly the scribe misread or wrongly divided in an attempt ...”

“... wife and four older children in Warrington, where he had served six terms as mayor. So Ken went to King Edward’s School, got a better education than he would have found at most boarding-schools, grew up heterosexual and entered Magdalen, Oxford in 1945 on a demyship of £50 a year. His spending allowance, ten pounds a week, was larger than that of most ...”

“... the composer Richard Rodgers (Rodgers and Hammerstein) in New York, she was invited to star in The King and I and did so at Drury Lane. Profumo did not immediately gain office when Churchill won the 1951 election, but a year later he became parliamentary undersecretary at the Ministry of Transport and Civil Aviation. While he was still at that ministry and ...”

“... on the walls was a large picture, exquisitely painted by Spagnoletto,’ of the martyrdom of St Stephen. The Spanish school evoked the rack, the rapier, the ruff, the spiral ebony chair-leg and the fainting nun, and a world that was now sufficiently distant or in decline (in The Antiquary it is the invasion of Bonaparte, not the Jacobites, for which beacons ...”

“... When the King’s printer Robert Barker produced a new edition of the King James Bible in 1631, he overlooked three letters from the seventh commandment, producing the startling injunction: ‘Thou shalt commit adultery.’ Barker was fined £300, and spent the rest of his life in debtors’ prison, even while his name remained on imprints ...”

“... first words to the policeman who wrestled him to the ground were: ‘Did I get him, did I get the king?’ His defence counsel Thomas Erskine, the Whig MP who had faced down Pitt’s government in the treason trials of 1794, disputed none of the facts but argued for dismissal even so. Hadfield had been under the illusion that he was God’s instrument, and ...”

“... Graham Greene, who fed her on oysters and smoked salmon, and took her to see Charlie’s Aunt and King Lear. When the film star Maureen Swanson wanted 18th-century Chinese wallpaper in her dining-room, but found she couldn’t afford it, Jocelyn Rickards was commissioned to create an oriental effect with her brushes. After two days of painting lotus lilies ...”