“... life: handsome, personalised spaces. They were not private in a 21st-century sense. As Alan Stewart showed long ago, rulers and patricians often shared them with their secretaries, with whom they planned invasions, plotted love affairs and sometimes talked about books. In Urbino and elsewhere, study walls were covered with intarsia panels, in which ...”

“... used to sign off with the phrase ‘Hearty Cheerios!’ The name was also given to Norman Baillie-Stewart, a Scot who had been imprisoned in the Tower in 1933 for selling military secrets to the Germans, and was one of the first Britons to join the English language service in Berlin. Barrington described his creation as speaking ‘English of the ...”

“... sisters in Christ,’ he shouted, ‘here is a great book that tells the Truth about Ulster. Go home, friend, and read it.’ The book was The Narrow Ground by A.T.Q. Stewart: did the book inspire Paisley, or did the voice of Old Ravenhill inspire The Narrow Ground? Accompanying this question is the problem of the ...”

“... G.’s story was that of an Irish squire who discovered his wife in an intrigue. She left her home, I think, with another man – and left her two young daughters. The episode was brief and disastrous – the other man left her in turn, and the husband took her back.’ James then went on to outline the details, as told to him by Lady Gregory, of the ...”

“... a solution: they offer a welcome straitjacket. Your car will get all the credit for bringing you home to yourself, for showing you the only person you can truly depend on is not merely yourself, but yourself-in-your-car, a somatic unity. Those who spend most of their lives being alert to the demands of others – and that’s most employees, most ...”

“... Rosenthal. His source material was a series of interviews Newman recorded with the screenwriter Stewart Stern between 1986 and 1991, along with ‘oral histories’ of Newman by his contemporaries. In her foreword, Newman’s daughter Melissa says he wanted to create ‘an offering to the offspring’ as well as to set the record straight after decades of ...”

“... drop-outs either. Not quite the Mods next door, they’re the modernists you might take home to mother: both deeply ordinary, and something entirely new.Later in the decade, Lennon and McCartney would both visit the wilder shores of avant-garde art/pol, though it was the Rolling Stones who summoned Dionysus and Pan, with their none hipper ...”

“... French verse – as one would expect from a poet in a court where the reigning favourite was Esmé Stewart, James’s French cousin. Technically, he was thoroughly competent and inventive, with a fondness for complicated and often pleasing stanzaic forms. But one is inclined to feel, after a time, that there is a surfeit of foreign kickshaws (though his ...”

“... aesthetic types; he took to frequenting Mrs Jack’s, the salon of the fabulously wealthy Isabella Stewart Gardner. Having raised three gay nephews, Mrs Jack was particularly tolerant of homosexuals, and was an influential patroness of the arts. Eliot’s correspondence with her suggests they had a number of friends in common. His ‘closest ...”

“... that caps the main moral drama of the novel. The subject of one of his reports is an initially Rod Stewart-esque entertainer whom Deza calls ‘Dickie Dearlove’ to protect his identity (even, and illogically, after Dearlove’s plunge into crime has been well publicised by the Sun and the Times and even El País) and also, presumably, to burlesque the ...”

“... US’s Cold War interests. The former CIA agent Miles Copeland – father of the Police drummer, Stewart Copeland – was employed by Booz Allen fresh after instigating coups in Syria and Iran. In 1953, he was sent to Egypt on assignment from both his former and current employers. His Booz Allen consulting work involved tracing the complex holdings of the ...”

“... to tell us whether production and consumption per capita rose or fell. But it is plain that the home market expanded, exports grew, and the balance of trade appears to have been favourable for most of Elizabeth’s reign: the large amounts of Spanish bullion arriving at the Mint and the substantial increase in the money supply point conclusively in that ...”

“... enters, consist of full-throttle solos by his star sidemen, Coleman Hawkins on tenor sax and Rex Stewart on cornet, as though their deep, manly voices – their figurative brass – would distract listeners from the ensemble’s complicity and literal support of the song’s demeaning lyrics, sung by Katherine Handy (W.C. Handy’s daughter), which include ...”

“... spent childhood holidays, that he really loved.He had wanted to raise his son there, to work from home, be ‘supported by the landscape’ and go on long walks: he didn’t write much about walks or landscapes, but he did once mention how much he distrusted the way W.G. Sebald, in his much admired Rings of Saturn (1995), ‘morosely trudged through the ...”

“... potent cult figure. Canetti chose a language and its literature, but his genius has no setting or home. He was born in 1905 in Ruschuk, Bulgaria, into a merchant clan of Sephardic Jews originally from Spain, and retaining from it a four-hundred-year-old cultural memory. Among themselves, they spoke the Spanish dialect called Ladino, and they had until ...”