“... any memory of his existence’ and so changed her son’s name from James Donald Bowman to James David Hamel: ‘Hamel’ was the name of her next husband; she wanted to preserve the ‘J.D.’, but the Donald had to go. He’s only been known as ‘J.D. Vance’ – sometimes with dots, sometimes without – since 2014, when he changed his name to honour ...”

“... 25,000 British and Egyptian troops assembled with their modern guns and ten Nile gunboats. By no means everything went smoothly, in particular when the 21st Lancers were ambushed during a cavalry charge. Even so, Ronald Meiklejohn reflected that his troops ‘had taken part in one of the most spectacular – and perhaps “safest” – battles ever ...”

“... pen into the noisome ink of the Hollywood gossip-monger, until he himself stinks of the odours he means us to associate with the Kennedys. Wills leads us into the world of Presidential power by the back door. Mimicking a Norman Mailer or a Frank Sinatra, he creates a world of booze and balls and broads and brawls which seems to be as seductive to him as it ...”

“... knowing it. They are conjured into the midst of life to tell a modern truth by purely modern means. This is what a great artist has always known how to do, although usually not in such a wholly distinctive medium. Cartier-Bresson’s was photo-reportage, later to shift into portrait-photo-reportage, documentary film and photojournalism, all of this a ...”

“... 1727-1783 (1989). Politeness was to be the sign of gentility in a commercial society, and the means of achieving politeness were themselves increasingly commercial, as objects of taste in literature and the arts were marketed with growing sophistication. The consumer wanted to be treated politely. Among the nine works on the 18th century cited in the list ...”

“... words, was ‘special’. In this context, Ceadel notes – but does not sufficiently heed – David Bebbington’s reminder that, for all their emphasis on a religion of the heart, evangelicals worked inside and not outside the Enlightenment rationalist tradition and so appealed to minds as well as hearts. What they shared across the denominations was ...”

“... both to deter and to negotiate, and to a delighted designer of posters gave the impression on a David Frost programme that if he were running the country, only Dad’s Army would stand between us and the Warsaw forces. Had it not been for defence, one old hand in the Party thought, the Tories might even have lost. But once more, helped by the continuing ...”

“... Williams’s five boys. In April 1994 Maxine had left the family home she shared with her husband David Handley in Newark Knok, and taken the kids to live at the house of her boyfriend Alex Joseph, at Lobelia Close in Beckton. Daniel went to Beckton Cross primary school, and was one of those kids who’d talk to anyone. He already had girlfriends, and was one ...”

“... now meant enjoying a practised familiarity with expensive rare books and manuscripts. Despite David Garrick’s bequest of his impressive collection of Renaissance playbooks to the new British Museum in 1779, this effectively meant that to be a legitimate Shakespearean critic now required the independent means to own a ...”

“... fashion should be judged on the criterion of ‘beauty’. On the contrary, he claims, ‘it means to be dressed correctly.’ He condemns the cult of beauty expressed ‘in the form of velvet collars, aesthetic trouser fabric and Secessionist neckties’. Second, he praises Savile Row fashion as a model of its kind. In true Brummell style, Loos argues ...”

“... feared,’ McCann writes, ‘he was in danger of succumbing to self-parody.’ I see what McCann means in terms of his career, but I would have thought that Cary Grant, the same Cary Grant McCann portrays, made words like ‘self-caricature’ and ‘self-parody’ almost meaningless. Mimicry, and a certain distance from his self, was part of who Cary Grant ...”

“... intellectual and Communist – following similar books in memory of John Cornford, Julian Bell and David Haden-Guest, all killed in the Spanish Civil War. (The present title, Beyond the Frontier, nods towards Stansky and Abrahams’s 1966 Journey to the Frontier, a reworking of the lives of Cornford and Bell.) Immediately after the war Frank became for many of ...”

“... SIVs. At least some of these cultures also employed chimpanzee sera to nourish the cells, which means there was substantial potential for recombination (the exchange of fragments of DNA) between different SIV strains in vitro. It has also been claimed, for instance by a group of researchers led by Beatrice Hahn, Bette Korber and Paul Sharp, that Aids could ...”

“... the Cold (1963). ‘It could,’ he said, ‘be turned into an opera.’ Le Carré – that is, David Cornwell, an ex-spy – once said that he entered the secret world ‘in the spirit of John Buchan and left it in the spirit of Kafka’; allowing for quite a lot of exaggeration at both ends, it’s a reasonable comment on The Spy who Came in from the ...”

“... learned book, as in much of his other writing, he is the only one in step. Bernard’s title means what it says: this is not a biography. And it is not about Henrician politics in general. Surprisingly, Bernard deals hardly at all with the fall and execution of Anne Boleyn. Some have seen Anne’s active interest in evangelical religious reform, and in ...”