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“... has recently become divorced, has a teenage son whom she adores, and earns her living in a New York museum. At the time the book opens, she has secured a commission to write her life of Lorin Jones and has been given leave of absence to do so. From the beginning, there are parallels, it appears, between Lorin and Polly, making Polly all the more eager to ...”

“... was glamorous, famous and wilful. She was neon when the rest of the Firm was a fifteen-watt bulb. Peter Mandelson told Charles that he was reckoned ‘glum and dispirited’. If only the studbook had gone beyond genealogy and had recorded the malicious speculation, ruthless jockeying for favour and backstabbing that pervades the Palace.From the Firm’s most ...”

“... a dozen biographies of Brando, or memoirs that depend on his presence. The weightiest of these is Peter Manso’s, published in 1994, when Brando still had ten years to live. (Mann hurries through those last years out of kindness as much as weariness. The killing of Drollet, the imprisonment of Christian and Cheyenne’s subsequent suicide left Brando a ...”

“... of Indian chiefs journeyed through the forest west of the British colonial town of Albany, New York, all heading for a single destination. Tuscaroras, Onondagas, Cayugas, Senecas and others: all of the Six Nations of the famed Iroquois Confederacy were represented. The focus of their attentions was a white man living in their midst, whose father had died ...”

“... clergyman Samuel Harsnett, chaplain to the Bishop of London (and himself a future Archbishop of York), published an attack on Catholic exorcists in general and on the Jesuit William Weston in particular. It has been known since the 18th century that Shakespeare knew Harsnett’s work and borrowed from it the names of the devils by whom Edgar, in ...”

“... David Jones, runs away to sea, survives the sinking of the Titanic, becomes a cook in New York, marries Ludmilla, the daughter of his Russian employer, returns to Wales and the First World War. He is in Ireland during the Rebellion and, because he is posted as dead, his wife goes to Russia and takes in the Revolution. The story is told in language ...”

“... reviews – some of which might also have been described as ‘crucifixions’ – for the New York Review of Books, and a number of these have just been reprinted, together with three longer pieces, in The Past and the Present. Some of his most important essays are missing from this collection: the one on the ‘educational revolution’ in England, for ...”

“... of 15 March 1989, when contractors tore down Richard Serra’s sculpture in Federal Plaza, New York City.’ Tilted Arc was demolished, after a court case, because local workers found this 36-metre steel wall oppressive. As the work made its way from physical existence to memory ‘there was a widespread feeling that the old avant-garde impulse – to ...”

“... an average day by reading articles on defence and defence contractors in the Washington Post, New York Times and Wall Street Journal, then move on to more detailed scrutiny of Aviation Week and Space Technology, technical magazines and trade publications. By lunchtime the information he has acquired would be sufficient to provoke an espionage trial if ...”

“... Knickerbocker thought it a steal: ‘They just sell the top quality,’ he told the New York Times, ‘whatever you buy at Costco, whether it’s a washing-machine or a vacuum cleaner. I just thought, if it’s a Picasso, you can’t go wrong.’ But it may have been a steal too far. The drawing had been verified by an art appraiser in Florida, and ...”

“... always like that for him,’ the child mused when, in the film’s opening sequence, Peter Parker, Spider-Man’s ‘real’ teenage self, missed the school bus. In that one remark the child encapsulated what the director and producers had got so right in casting Tobey Maguire as the misfit character, and in their gentle faithfulness throughout ...”

“... governessing her charges, beginning when Lilibet was five and her mother ‘the little Duchess of York’. Read Crawfie and you have to adjust to diminutives. Margaret is still described as a little girl when she’s 17. On the other hand, she’s very helpful on history, explaining about Glamis Castle: ‘Here dwelt Macbeth, who is reputed to be by no means ...”

“... have to be particularly hideous. It is impossible to give a full list, but among those chosen were Peter Quennell, Feliks Topolski, Alan Ross, Kenneth Tynan and Charles Addams, as well as a lot of extras with names like Old B., the Bastard and Chuff. She did not waste her time with intellectuals, but absorbed their appreciation of art and literature. She has ...”

“... Callas’s correspondence with her godfather, Leonidas Lantzounis, a Greek doctor living in New York. Callas wrote to him over a period of thirty years with astonishing frankness, especially about her notoriously hostile feelings towards her mother and sister. Secondly, there were transcripts of conversations between Callas and the American music critic ...”

“... the first anything – unstudied, unelaborated, untouched by rules.’ That would be horribly like Peter Pan if it were not for the slyness in the sweetness. It shows how crafty the most ‘spontaneous’ art invariably is – if it succeeds as art. At the same time Whitman’s jottings and MS do reveal more disturbed and even distracted feelings and ...”