“... by the index. There’s Bette Davis and Joe Davis and Sammy Davis Jr. There’s Basil Dean and James Dean, Jack Warner of Dock Green and Jack Warner of Hollywood. Jayne Mansfield lines up alongside Mantovani, and Field-Marshal Viscount Montgomery is discovered between Maria Montez and Dudley Moore. Kim Novak and Ivor Novello are neighbours, but then so are ...”

“... remarks on Don Quixote, extraordinary essays on Byron, Dickens, Ibsen, Frost, Marianne Moore, D.H. Lawrence; but when Auden wants to evoke ‘a parable of agape’, or ‘Holy Love’, he talks about Bertie Wooster’s relation to Jeeves. Bertie in his blithering is a comic model of humility, and his reward is Jeeves’s immaculate and unfailing ...”

“... of exploration and scientific achievement in England between two celebrated voyages, Captain James Cook’s first circumnavigation of the world in the Endeavour in the late 1760s and Charles Darwin’s expedition to the Galapagos in the 1830s. William and Caroline Herschel’s advances in astronomy and Humphry Davy’s in chemistry dominate both ...”

“... in their exotic spear-waving poses. It was some relief to see the paperback of James Fox’s excellent White Mischief with its measured exposure of the shallow callous daftness of settler society circa 1940, popping cheekily up among them. Nairobi is still Africa’s safari capital, where the lucky tourist is offered all kinds of trips to ...”

“... had cried ‘Ourselves Alone’ and yet, following the inspiration of their executed leader James Connolly, had also linked their nationalism to the international struggle for socialism. Having lost all appetite for the patriotism that had been harnessed to the propaganda machine of the British state, Goldring imagined an England of the same stripe: an ...”

“... Robert Montgomery during Chandler’s lifetime, and afterwards by Elliot Gould, Robert Mitchum and James Garner. He was the hero of the most listened to radio detective serial in history, and, by the time Chandler died in 1959, had sold over five million books. The private eye was the wilderness hero moved to the urban frontier, alone and unattached, living ...”

“... death is fleeing the frame on the right. There are no such illusions – another surprise – in James Tissot’s small, brutal watercolour of an event he witnessed on 29 May 1871. It shows a high wall, part of the fortifications in the Bois de Boulogne, and a man in the uniform of the National Guard plummeting backwards through the air, jacket ...”

“... during the darkest period of his mourning. The volume includes letters to Joseph Priestley, Thomas Lawrence, John Thelwall, Samuel Parr (‘the Whig Dr Johnson’), the great liberal advocate Thomas Erskine, R.B. Sheridan, Charles James Fox, the novelists and dramatists Elizabeth Inchbald, Thomas Holcroft, Amelia ...”

“... biography, since the principals have to share top billing with Mrs Inchbald, Sheridan, Thomas Lawrence and Mrs Jordan. There is a curious line of contact between several of these figures: four of them were the subjects of biographies by James Boaden (1762-1839), who happened also to edit Garrick’s letters. Ms Kelly ...”

“... In No News at Throat Lake,* his account of a year spent working on a small-town Irish newspaper, Lawrence Donegan gleefully reports Newt Gingrich staging a visit to the Doherty Clan Centre on the Inishowen peninsula, where he was to be publicly presented with his family tree: he had to retreat when the clan chieftain told him they couldn’t trace it. In the ...”

“... her reliably sympathetic: ‘I dont think she cares a fig realy – she is like me.’ His cousin Lawrence also proved like-minded; the pair of them took to calling themselves Gladys and Phyllis Dilly. Edward as Gladys doubled once as Widow Twankey. The Dilly sisters were imagined belles of Rye, the cobbled and gabled ‘Tinkerbell Towne’, as Burra dubbed ...”

“... advice about the very experiences he has never had. ‘Don’t be scared of being an artist. D.H. Lawrence was an artist through and through,’ he cheers his son on. When Vidia tells him that he has not succeeded in meeting Professor Radhakrishnan, who taught Eastern Religions at Oxford, Pa replies with a bustle of recommendations: I do hope you did succeed ...”

“... we are given instances of those who supported the role of violence, Carlyle, Ruskin and T.E. Lawrence – hardly a representative sample and not strictly contemporary. One absent theme, striking to those aware of modern historiography, is the experience of women. In a long exposition of the development of socialism, which carries an updating of ...”

“... run? Was it that wicked Uncle Rupert who sodomised young Howard? The late Photoplay publisher James Quirk told his nephew Lawrence (who decades later told Mr Higham) that Rupert put pressure on Hughes to go to bed with him. Higham says they say that Rupert owned a circular graveyard in New England in which he kept the ...”

“... to a neat tablet with garlanded urn, honeysuckle ornament and elegant lettering dedicated to Sir James Burrow (1701-82) of Starborough Castle, a lawyer active in the intellectual life of Georgian London (‘above 30 Years Vice President of the Royal Society’). We read that ‘the Convivial Character was what He chiefly affected as it was his constant Wish ...”