“... to marry her, including Leland Hayward, the agent and producer, and she had been nearly raped by John Barrymore, according to whom she had backed away against the wall of his dressing-room stammering: ‘No, no, my father doesn’t want me to have babies.’ Her mother, after all, apart from her social grandeur, was a serious and distinguished pioneer in the ...”

“... by her father to read novels, and later by a father confessor to read anything but Latin, Teresa took to conversing with God, who, in a delphic observation she did not understand when he first made it, promised her ‘a living book’. From then on, she began to experience rapturous visions, and indeed made a book. Her visions, as Brigid Brophy shrewdly ...”

“... with which they made their choice. Prince Albert’s choice showed that he had what it took as surely as Edward’s showed that he had not. Lasting only from December 1936 to February 1952, George VI’s was a short reign, barely fifteen years, but it was an exceptionally difficult one, for three reasons. First, the sensational circumstances of his ...”

“... a used Johnnie,’ she added – this being the name by which former members of St John’s College, Oxford, refer to themselves. We knew that because both of us were also, to use the posh term, Johnians. The LRB asked Blair to write a piece, and he did. Its left-is-best vibe makes entertaining reading now, but it’s well written and at least ...”

“... to the current condition of the financial industry, Other People’s Money, published in 2015, John Kay talks about the state of the UK banking sector, whose assets then were about £7 trillion, four times the aggregate income of everyone in the country. But the assets of British banks ‘mostly consist of claims on other banks. Their liabilities are ...”

“... on it when it was sent home from Italy. Doubtless that was put right before the coffin took its place in the family vaults. In terms of solid pomp Schönbrunn or the Escorial have nothing on the funerary monuments of an American cemetery. The irony multiplies when the Lowell entourage is considered. Every difficult poet has his devoted ...”

“... might fantasise about what it was like, but to go further was dangerous. In 1318, a man called John, perhaps the son of an Exeter tanner, appeared at Oxford’s north gate claiming that he was the rightful king of England. John said that he was Edward I’s true first-born son, swapped out in the cradle by a negligent ...”

“... as the bicycle and the motor-powered engine. One question that arose straight away was whether one took the side of progress or tradition. Were the cut-off communities better in their unadulterated state, or was it time the amenities of everyday life were extended to them? It depended on how you looked at it. Synge, for example, found a lot to revere in the ...”

“... the relevant Oxford movement was the Oxford Movement, an Anglo-Catholic revival, which first took shape with the publication of Tracts for the Times in 1833, grew in fame along with its great polemicist John Henry Newman, was denounced for being a semi-covert form of Roman Catholicism, and then suffered a colossal ...”

“... He was subjected to even more abuse from the British press and public than Nasser or John Foster Dulles. In a widely photographed incident, Altrincham was physically assaulted. His assailant shouted to the pressmen he had summoned to watch: ‘This is for insulting the Queen!’ The papers – except the Times, which on advice from the palace ...”

“... Auerbach’s, including Kermode’s ‘Introduction to the New Testament’ and his chapter on St John’s Gospel, and Alter’s Introduction to the Old Testament and his essay ‘The Characteristics of Hebrew Poetry’ – probably the best treatment of this difficult subject now available. Attention to conventions does not mean, however, that the majority ...”

“... he discovered Jung, and wrote a good number of fantasies about the anima. London, however, never took himself wholly seriously: there is something almost Pushkinesque about the lightheartedness with which he mixes the short-story genres together, so that each makes a certain amount of sly fun of the other. What he lacks in the master touch he can make up in ...”

“... battle: one into brewery management, the youngest (Cobb’s father) into civil engineering, which took him to South Africa in the Boer War and later to the Sudan. A gentle but positive man, Cobb père no more than mildly resented this choice of an avocation for him, making a success of it to the point of being able to send his daughter to the Godophin School ...”

“... meanwhile, things were changing fast. In Baroque Bohemia, as Tuck-well lucidly relates, the horn took a ‘great leap forward’ from the chase to the chamber group. In the early 1680s, a certain Franz Anton, Count von Sporck found himself so pleased by the cors de chasse at Louis XIV’s court that he took some horns home ...”

“... with books. One by one, they delivered me mini lectures on the subject of my recent book. It took me a while to realise what was happening. They were connecting themselves to my research, inserting themselves into my story. At the end of the visit, the department organised a ‘presentation’ of the book. The whole department showed up. This turned out ...”