“... that dispose one somewhat more against Tennant. Philip Hoare relates one, as told by the Hon. David Herbert, about his treatment of the actress Margaret Rutherford. He cultivated her assiduously – even, more or less, proposing marriage to her – and she fell for his charms, and then when one day she came to his house for the weekend, he quite shattered ...”

“... beastly drunk, honk, bray, bully, drive offensively expensive Rolls-Royces, and flaunt their other nice things in the faces of those who cannot afford them. Their very nicest things are beautiful women like Francesca. – much preferable to the Guardian-reading drabs and West Indian whores who would normally cater to Colin’s needs did he not nurture ideas ...”

“... profile for the work entrusted to him, he cannot properly edit. One of Gaskell’s case-studies is David Copperfield. To establish the text of this novel, the well-intentioned editor must survey the number plans and MS (which, thanks to Forster, survive); the proofs which Dickens corrected for the first serialised-in-monthly-numbers issue, put out by Bradbury ...”

“... Now King David was old and stricken in years; and they covered him with clothes, but he gat no heat. Wherefore his servants said unto him, Let there be sought for my lord the king a young virgin: and let her stand before the king, and let her cherish him, and let her lie in thy bosom, that my lord the king may get heat ...”

“... itself, or on its musical realisation, or even on the performers, but on what Ruth Berghaus or David Alden or Andrei Serban is saying about it. Or rather what images they are inflicting upon it – for the production of opera is primarily a matter of what something is made to look like. Singers rarely have any authentic acting ability and the wiser ...”

“... aunt. The most important effect was to create a very close bond between Christina and her father, David; but then David Stead remarried. There was a stepmother, and soon a brood of half-brothers and sisters, which grew to number five. Christina felt the gap open between her and the man who had been mother and father; and at ...”

“... is perishable. Caesar’s precipitous rise and fall is a case in point. In When Caesar Was King, David Margolick’s admirable mission is to remind the reader of Caesar’s clout and to bring him back into the cultural discussion. To that end, he has thrown a wide net over the shows and the people who made them, although he doesn’t know quite what to make ...”

“... to an Evening Standard reporter who wanted to interview me and get a photograph. He’d been quite nice about it and gone away, but when I come out the photographer is still hanging about and asks me to pose with my bike. I say no, whereupon he starts snapping regardless. Even as I cycle off down Regent’s Park Road he runs after me snapping away. Why? On ...”

“... of the Hampton Jitney. The novel’s frequent name-checks of branded luxury goods made a nice fit for the advertisers in the New York Times Magazine, in whose pages The Lemur was first published serially earlier this year. Glass, however, has never felt at ease in this environment, or so he tells himself. He has had some time to get used to it, but ...”

“... wit, yet he considered jokes risky because they easily gave offence: ‘The right management of so nice and ticklish a business, wherein a little slip may spoil all, is not everyone’s talent.’ Just as bad were ‘frothy light discourses’ and ‘misbecoming wit’ about religious matters. In the 1670s and 1680s Locke supervised the education of Anthony ...”

“... violence and filth of life at sea and of a richly imagined mid-19th-century New York. When a ‘nice little fag’ passes an orange to him in the brig, McGlue enjoys its rotten sourness, ‘puking fruit into a bucket already half full of blackie piss and shit’. But gradually we become aware of McGlue’s humanity: his grim past (abusive mother, weak ...”

“... know on our behalf and pass the information on in such a way that we can absorb it. Well, it’s a nice idea. But reports on the wandering womb, the dangers of masturbation, relative racial brain size, cold fusion, food safety, weapons of mass destruction, the death of the author, suggest that it’s a hit and miss sort of strategy for getting an accurate ...”

“... possessions, and take their place around a world-wide camp-fire of kith and kin. There was a nice touch of ambiguity about the non-British communities involved: like the Boers, they were to consent freely on pain of the big stick. But Amery was dazzled by the grandeur of the scheme. A shutter came down in his mind and he was to remain possessed by ...”

“... David Attenborough​ was born in 1926, the same year as Marilyn Monroe, Fidel Castro and Elizabeth II. He began hosting Zoo Quest on BBC television in 1954; not quite seventy years later, his latest series, Wild Isles, has just finished airing (it’s still available on iPlayer, or Amazon Prime for those outside the UK ...”

“... Warburg reissued his Orchid Trilogy as a single volume, with an introduction by Powell, and it is nice to see this trilogy now reprinted as a Penguin Classic. For his work is oddly appealing, and it is worth probing why. The form, as he invented it in his first book, The Military Orchid (1948), and exploited further in A Mine of Serpents and The Goose ...”