“... 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 ...”

“... which survive. This inspired later writers of character sketches in the vernacular, such as Joseph Hall in 1608, to supply the characters of such paragons as the Good Magistrate, whose ‘breast is the ocean whereinto all the cares of private men empty themselves’, and whose temperate and impartial love of justice bears so little resemblance to ...”

“... is not very natural. The sentences refuse to lie down, and often he turns the page into a lecture hall. Even the best essay in the book, his fine celebration of Nabokov, has a kind of aural clatter: ‘I may also seem to be saying that if Lolita, the supreme novel of love in the 20th century, is a parody of earlier love novels, we should not be ...”

“... anecdotes about farcical misadventures in the line of duty. The live SWAT training session at City Hall, for instance, with a scenario he devised, involving an anti-tax militia threatening to kill the mayor: a shopper trying out scanners at a nearby Radio Shack tuned in to the walkie-talkies and mistook the exercise for a real attack. I’ve come to think of ...”

“... the hyacinthine, leaf-lipped lovely of Oscar’s letters than a ventriloquist’s dummy or a music hall turn. Indeed, when Wilde’s letter referring to the peculiar virtues of the witness’s mouth was read out in court, Douglas exploded: ‘it is a rotten, sodomitically inclined letter written by a diabolical scoundrel to a wretchedly silly youth. You ought ...”

“... a matter of seconds he wins $260. A moment later he wins another $80. We go on into the convention hall in a state of slightly unreal elation. Along with Cannes, this is TV’s biggest sales event, and the place is teeming. Men mostly, with silk suits, cigars, shaved heads and elaborate underlip topiary. Chris has the blue ID card of a buyer, which acts as a ...”

“... show ends with some of the things Fenton left out. Sebastopol after the siege was photographed by James Robertson, who revealed the destruction to be total and uninteresting, as wreckage must be to those who don’t know what was there before. More striking are the photographs of wounded veterans commissioned by Queen Victoria: glimpsed only in reproduction ...”

“... Yeats. His childhood playgrounds were the sombre, boggy landscape and the racing stables of Moore Hall on the shores of Lough Carra in County Mayo. He was sent to Oscott, a Roman Catholic boarding school near Birmingham, where his academic career was undistinguished: in December 1865 the headmaster Spencer Northcote wrote to Moore’s father to inform him ...”

“... that were ‘built to envious show’ amidst the riot of competitive expenditure in the reign of James I. The Sidneys never had the money to spoil their inheritance, which survives as a glorious muddle of a house, centred on an enchanting Medieval hall and sprawling out into its Renaissance and later additions. Jonson’s ...”

“... filled the area behind what is now St Peter’s Square with grand buildings such as the Free Trade Hall (now a hotel) and Manchester Central railway station (now a conference centre). Leigh’s set designers therefore built early 19th-century Manchester in an Elizabethan fort on the Thames. The post-production editor was busy on his laptop erasing the ...”

“... about him, supposing that he was travelling or busy with the estate.‘Petersburg is the front hall, Moscow is the maids’ quarters, but the country is our study,’ says another ex-officer, retiring from the tedious excitement of the capital to his country estate, in the prose fragment ‘A Novel in Letters’. ‘A decent man passes of necessity through ...”

“... a long way from his German homeland. He was one of the porcelain Gnomen-Figuren brought to Lamport Hall in Northamptonshire in the 1840s to populate the huge rockery, fissured with crevices and ravines, which Sir Charles Isham created in front of his bedroom window. The rockery reflected Isham’s love of the Alpine but he was also widely read in folklore, a ...”