“... for which he had a passion. He loved in particular the work of the New York City Ballet under George Balanchine who in 1974 he considered ‘the great genius in the arts today’. Balanchine was as laconic as Gorey, who liked quoting the choreographer’s frequent advice in rehearsal, ‘Better don’t do.’ A sketch from the ‘Scènes de ...”

“... on what sound like fairly reasonable grounds. While decrying Picasso’s ‘duchess period’, his ball-going and fancy costumes, Braque was, in his soberer way, a pretty dressy fellow himself: on his rare trips to London, he headed not for the National Gallery but for the house of Mr Lobb the bootmaker. He had a taste for fast and expensive cars, both driving ...”

“... Immortal Cells of Henrietta Lacks’, is illustrated with a photograph of a cell. It looks like a ball of maggots. Is this her? No. It is a duly credited picture of a ‘cultured rat bone marrow cell’, magnified 19,500 times. According to the anonymous author, the HeLa line was begun when cells were taken from the cervix of a 31-year-old Baltimore ...”

“... slaughter the marauding Pindari armies of Chitu, although he does not quote the remark of Colonel George Fitzclarence, an aide-de-camp to the Governor of Bengal, who underlined their real purpose. The Pindaris were ‘viewed as public robbers’, Fitzclarence wrote, and so ‘their extirpation was aimed at, and not their defeat as an enemy entitled to the ...”

“... more naive-sounding, but altogether more accurate description of what was going on was provided by George Osborne on Question Time, who accused Brown of ‘playing politics with the political process’. That’s exactly what he was doing, which is why when he got the politics wrong the whole thing blew up in his face. So the extensive alterations to ...”

“... legal niceties’ – as succinct a description as any of Americans’ responses to torture under George W. Bush.After converting from Episcopalianism to Catholicism in 2016 – he claimed that there was no stable point between atheism and Catholicism – Vermeule developed an online presence dedicated to trolling and triggering the libs. He was fond of ...”

“... historic station’s access to the rail network and keep intact more of the structures designed by George Stephenson, the engineer who built the Liverpool & Manchester. But Whitby’s route, apart from costing £20 million more, would run through, and interfere with, a project on a long-derelict piece of land, Middlewood Locks, where the state-owned Beijing ...”

“... and as tough as a Trident missile’; Cheryl Mills, Clinton’s top State Department aide, is a ‘ball-buster’ and a ‘pit bull’. But Clinton’s hawkishness is a matter of moral and intellectual conviction. In Hard Choices, she tries to construct a coherent rationale for an interventionist foreign policy and to justify it with reference to her own ...”

“... looked for a while as if they were going to up-end the two-party system, with Perot leading George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton in the midsummer polls. In 1996, Pat Buchanan (‘The peasants are coming with pitchforks’) appealed to the same bloc of voters with a programme that was militantly Christian, white, nativist, provincial, protectionist and ...”

“... he writes to an old teacher: ‘I’m as famous as a movie star, which is sort of fun.’ He has a ball mistaking the great and the good. At dinner in Hollywood, he sat beside ‘a little man who kept staring at me as though he were planning something unspeakably diabolic; he turned out to be Leon Feuchtwanger, only I thought he was Franz Werfel.’ In Venice ...”

“... reading after dinner, and then early to bed in preparation for another day of turning the doughy ball of thought into light, crisp sentences. The secret of happiness, it has been said, is to develop habits whose repetition we find enjoyable and whose outcomes we find satisfying. For the greater part of his very long adult life, Victor Sawdon Pritchett seems ...”

“... the men their best suits or ceremonial outfits. Near the awning set up for special guests, George Clooney, who is deeply involved in Sudanese causes, holds forth in front of a throng of cameras; a little further on, the American senator and former Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry speaks calmly to a few journalists. Between photo ...”

“... so completely with the characters he played in films, such as the idealised football player George Gipp in Knute Rockne, All American (1940), that they took up long-term residence in his consciousness. As president, Reagan routinely invoked the Notre Dame star when he implored subordinates to ‘go out there and win one for the Gipper.’ A Regular ...”

“... London has more of in a quarter of an hour than Boston in nine months; he begs everyone, as he did George du Maurier, ‘Do tell me everything that has, or hasn’t happened’ – and ‘everything’ includes even those subjects that in theory James isn’t much interested in, like politics and scandal. One of the most memorable and characteristic brief ...”

“... who quarried it seems much more evocative than the actual wall itself. Instead we buy a couple of George III country chairs very reasonably in an antique shop before going round the much larger antique centre in Philip Webb’s parish hall. 6 January. Papers full of Charles Kennedy being, or having been, an alcoholic. I’d have thought Churchill came close ...”