“... decline, but eating bananas had been the major cause of death. A lawyer called Albert T. Patrick took charge of the funeral arrangements. On the day after Rice’s death, Patrick tried to have four cheques certified. The cheques, all made out to himself, totalled $250,000, and appeared to have been signed by Rice on the day before he died. When James ...”

“... Holy Land was at its most holy in your own heart. This might be a demanding belief for those who took it seriously, but religious certainty could also make it a comfort. Sometimes the reassurance came a little too easily. Even when such faith was common, the inward annexation of the Holy Land made sophisticated religious thinkers suspicious. In Apocalypse ...”

“... Of guitar pioneer Les Paul we learn that Bill ‘found him charming’. He and blues singer John Hammond ‘chatted for a while’. He ‘met’ Bob Dylan. Above all, what you miss from Wyman’s account – that word again – is any pride in, or even positive recognition of, the danger of the Stones at their peak. This is the band that played ‘Stray ...”

“... of Europe, notably Britain, the American Revolution may still be unfinished. Looking back in 1818, John Adams asked a fundamental question: ‘But what do we mean by the American Revolution? Do we mean the American war? The Revolution was effected before the war commenced. The Revolution was in the hearts and minds of the people; a change in their religious ...”

“... with Memoirs from the Declaration of the War with Spain’, begun in 1746, now first published by John Brooke as an appendix to his edition. The title is misleading, for these are annals of the Hanoverian accession, and don’t get anywhere within hailing distance of Jenkins Ear. The date is significant: Robert Walpole had died in 1745, and a year later his ...”

“... logical and unemotional. To their colleagues they appeared strong, stern, shy and silent; they took work home at night and at weekends; they had time for few hobbies or recreations; they jealously guarded their private lives; but in the select company of those who knew them well, they were warm-hearted, charming, kindly and ...”

“... life of Civvy Street, when the Kray Twins ruled London – or so the timorous newspapers claimed. John Dickson, a former member of the Krays’ firm, has somehow produced a well-written book, Murder without Conviction. ‘We looked like any normal businessmen in our pin-striped suits,’ he says, describing the firm’s negotiations with the Mafia. The Krays ...”

“... Eastman was living in New York with Crystal, and through a friend of hers became an assistant to John Dewey at Columbia. Dewey was one of the leading philosophers in America, and his prestige beyond university philosophy departments was such that, as Eastman recalled, ‘rays of his influence may have helped to mould me long before I heard of him.’ The ...”

“... claim that Desperate Characters is ‘obviously superior to any novel by Fox’s contemporaries John Updike, Philip Roth and Saul Bellow’. My own reservations lie not with the superlatives, but with the implicit grounds for comparison. If Fox is, in Franzen’s phrase, ‘inarguably great’ – and I believe she is – it isn’t because, for ...”

“... Spectator where he found the famous pieces by J.D. Scott and Anthony Hartley, or the scripts of John Wain’s Third Programme magazine First Reading, or copies of the Reading limited editions of Wain and Amis. Mr Morrison claims to have eschewed gossip and attended instead to such questions as: ‘Did the writers know each other? Is there any evidence of ...”

“... Twenty-one years ago, in The Characters of Love, John Bayley suggested that ‘there is a sense in which the highest compliment we can pay to Shakespeare is to discuss his great plays as if they were also great novels.’ At that time, Othello seemed to him particularly (indeed uniquely) responsive to such treatment ...”

“... son of a prosperous tradesman, who like Mr Bounderby exaggerated the lowliness of his origins; John Sheepshanks, so shabbily dressed that he was once refused admission to a first-class railway carriage, who told raucous jokes to the Prime Minister as he showed him round his gallery; jolly John Miller, with long white ...”

“... In bed​, John Berger was once asked by a lover: who’s your favourite painter? Caravaggio, he replied. There are two kinds of desire, according to Berger: the desire to take and the ‘desire to be taken’. Caravaggio painted the second kind. The desire ‘to lose oneself’, ‘the most abandoned, the most desperate’ form of wanting: this is what Caravaggio put on the canvas ...”

“... the Liberals as the principal challenger to the Conservatives. The first Labour government took office after the general election of December 1923, but it was a minority administration with just 191 MPs, surviving for barely ten months. Labour returned to power in 1929, again as a minority government, though this time it was the biggest party. It was ...”

“... present. ‘Unbelievably,’ he says of the Irish nationalist Daniel O’Connell’s killing of John D’Esterre (in a duel that set Catholic against Protestant), ‘O’Connell faced no legal proceedings at all over this act, while his standing among his followers was enhanced.’Rather than spoiling his book, this authorial stance galvanises readers to ...”