“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... music over the title, followed by a clip from the beginning of Hitchcock’s Vertigo – James Stewart climbing onto the roof from which his colleague is about to fall to his death. De Palma’s voice says: ‘I saw Vertigo in 1958. I saw it at Radio City Music Hall. I will never forget it.’ As he speaks the last ...”

“... actual motion, and done with such light airy facility. Oh! it delighted me when I saw it,’ James Northcote, a pupil of Reynolds, said, having watched Gainsborough at work on Queen Charlotte’s drapery.But these accounts of his later practice are irrelevant to the pictures one turns to first: those crisp, bright, freshly coloured group portraits in ...”

“... 1892 Mallock register produce these surprising phrases?TP: Exactly. You won’t remember the music hall. The reference in music hall was always to serious things. There was a man who used to do an act called ‘Brush up your Shakespeare.’ It was fed by culture. Things are sort of divided now, so rubbish is entirely ...”

“... Macmillan and is protected now by the enthusiasm of men such as Roy Jenkins and Robert Rhodes James. But why should those of us who are excluded from this desirable club at Westminster want such an extended work of collective biography? In the case of these volumes one obvious reason lies in the period that they cover. They begin one year after the ...”

“... between them these two engaging old monstres profanes have produced a book as entertaining as a James Bond novel with the same pace, excitement and high standard of consumer durables, feminine splendour and male chauvinist piggery. The Baron broke all the rules of seduction, he says, with ‘two exceptions. I never deflower and I do not persist if the lady ...”