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“... his context. Words weren’t his language; he spoke in action. In one of many piquant anecdotes in James Curtis’s encyclopedic new biography, on hearing the thumps as Keaton repeatedly threw himself against their common office wall at Twentieth Century Fox, the film editor Gene Fowler stuck his head into Keaton’s ...”

“... Volume III brings us to the Renaissance. We notice immediately the firm direction of the editor, James McConica, who has imposed an order on the writing of the history of the University in the 16th century that is uncommon in productions by diverse hands. His long-standing interest in the social composition of Oxford, and his familiarity with some of the ...”

“... attention by speaking to him this way, the way I would say some years ago I used to see people on Fox News, for example, or other places trying to talk to Trump.’In the age when TV news was dominant, from the 1960s to the early 2000s, we were used to two strands of news authority, the official and the sceptical. On the official side were stage-managed ...”

“... 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 mentions these lives in her preface, and one might almost suppose that the spur for writing this book came to her from the arrival of a hoard of Boaden volumes from a relative’s ...”

“... There also seems to be much more space devoted to practitioners of golf, cricket, rowing and fox-hunting than to professional footballers. By the time we reach the letter B, the tone of the volume is unmistakably established in two scrupulously mandarin pieces by Lord Trend on Bridges and Normanbrook, his predecessors at the Cabinet ...”

“... place. Taking counsel, they did the obvious thing and asked their saint to turn the thief into a fox. At once a vixen appeared with a cheese in its mouth, though the guilty monk was nowhere to be found. As such tales suggest, saints’ Lives reveal a tension between historicity and edification (or entertainment). Some vitae were begun while their subjects ...”

“... of inquiry reward scrupulous attention to variability and which do not. The Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell, whom Radick quotes for his witty riposte to Galton that if heredity was destiny, then belief in free will must be predetermined too, observed that Galileo had been lucky to begin his inquiry with the fall of heavy bodies rather than ...”

“... the allotted Uncle Tom role. This is why a young black woman identified with Marilyn Monroe. James Baldwin identified with her too, as he told Weatherby when he was introduced to him by Tennessee Williams. Not that Weatherby was the only writer on Monroe to spot these moments of what might seem like odd affinity. Lee Strasberg’s ...”

“... and ‘popular’ literature became even more marked: ‘For every reader of Henry James and D.H. Lawrence,’ the publisher Michael Joseph observed in 1925, ‘there are a hundred readers of Nat Gould and Ethel M. Dell.’ And if we look further forward into the interwar period, the peaks of the popular market become higher still, especially ...”

“... isn’t like that,’ they’re off the hook. 20 February. We’re gradually assembling a class: James Corden, who’s plump and funny and at the audition entirely takes charge; Sacha Dhawan, an Asian boy from Manchester who complains that all he’s ever offered these days are Muslim terrorists or Afghan refugees; Jamie Parker, who is to play Scripps the ...”

“... the outstanding individual, someone whose outsize talent can carry the weaker players. When LeBron James moves from city to city, the teams he plays for rise and fall with him. Obama was so much more talented than anyone else around – so smart, so eloquent, so cool under pressure – that his teammates must have hoped he could do the same for them. Golf is ...”

“... as its ‘political and poetic undertones’ really ‘passed him by’. He was at Stowe when James Gibbs built the Temple of Liberty. This curious triangular, turreted, ironstone building with battlements on the outside and elaborate spurious heraldry on the inside, connecting Lord Cobham with his Saxon ancestors and their ancient freedoms, was the ...”

“... his wife, Eliza Wilson, Walter remained a key figure in Stuckey’s. Eliza was the daughter of James Wilson, the owner-founder of the Economist, who also became Palmerston’s financial secretary to the Treasury. Wilson, a genial, acute, hard-driving Scot, was then picked out to rescue the finances of India after the Mutiny of 1857, which he did with a ...”

“... obsessives, novelists (Hilary Mantel, Sarah Waters, Madeline Miller), classicists (Robin Lane Fox, Bettany Hughes), historians (Tom Holland), who salute her muscular resurrections of the classical world, and gay men who see her as a pioneer in her writing about homosexual relationships. Along with hundreds of other gay men, many of them closeted, the ...”

“... shires, it turned out that the railways could energise, commercialise and broaden participation in fox hunting. Casual hunters were able to pay their dues and whizz off for a weekend’s hunting like modern middle-class city dwellers flying easyJet to the Alps for a skiing minibreak: A Londoner could hunt six days a week in season, meets being arranged on ...”