“... Day, tenacious as a badger; Ludovic Kennedy, whose line is artistic, faintly raffish melancholy; James Mossman, the ardent Galahad who will never take for granted that men are sometimes wicked on purpose; Robert Kee, the hot-eyed public prosecutor … When John Birt arrived at the BBC as Deputy Director-General at the end of the 1980s, apocalyptic ...”

“... George Moscone and City Supervisor Harvey Milk were others) bedazzled by the ghoulish Reverend Jim Jones, charismatic leader of the San Francisco-based Peoples Temple cult, Elvis-style drug addict, ambisexual pussy-predator, and self-anointed ‘revolutionary socialist’ who in 1978 subsequently persuaded 900 or so of his followers, mostly poor ...”

“... is just a marionette of conscience, a hodge-podge of the stiffest gestures of Gary Cooper and James Stewart. Tommy Lee Jones, the suave gay New Orleans businessman caught up in all kinds of nasty deals, is so deeply untrustworthy that you can’t take your eyes off him; everything he does is full of sleaze and ...”

“... more correctly rendered ‘Horn of Antimony’. If there were a Spark Notebook, like Henry James’s, an imaginable entry might run: ‘Suppose that in our time some rich man were not only deep in the study of Job but himself in a situation of – well, shall I say discomfort, interested in the vague analogy between himself and his subject? Something ...”

“... James Bond was a well-known ornithologist. His Birds of the West Indies is an unusually rich source of names. According to Bond, the Sooty Tern is also known as the Egg Bird; Booby; Bubí; Hurricane Bird; Gaviota Oscura; Gaviota Monja; Oiseau Fou; Touaou. But when the keen birdwatcher Ian Fleming needed a name that sounded as ordinary as possible, he had to look no further than the title page of Bond’s great work ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... might be short, his art matured at hectic speed. Its roots were among the Pre-Raphaelites. Burne-Jones was an early champion and the dishevelled androgynous figure in Withered Spring, a drawing of 1891, has the heavy, sensuous eyes and mouth of Jane Morris. A year later, in Incipit Vita Nova, they had gone. An impassive female head with closed eyes faces a ...”

“... shared no man’s land seems oddly larger than the territory disputed. The opening move was Ernest Jones’s three-decker monument (1953-57), and his successors make us choose a Freud, as if to write this life without a case to prove were impossible. If we need more lives of Freud it is because there is safety in numbers, but the evidential burden tends to ...”

“... Soane was born in 1753, the son of a Berkshire bricklayer. At 15 he met a London architect, James Peacock, who was closely associated with George Dance, architect to the City of London. Dance gave Soane a place in his household. After three or four years he left Dance for Henry Holland, from whom he learned more of the business side of building and on ...”

“... his gift for showmanship and his Paris education to make himself the prototype Victorian aesthete, James McNeill Whistler had started out as a dutiful son, following his father to West Point before turning his back on the Army to pursue the artist’s life in Paris. He arrived there in 1855, at the height of the craze for the vie de bohème, and like many ...”

“... be very high. So, predictably enough, it has been with the United Nations. Readers approaching James Traub’s and Stanley Meisler’s books thus have reason to expect the worst. In some ways the expectation is amply fulfilled, but in others the two books – each by a journalist – cast more light on the UN than is normally allowed to fall on it. The ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... seductively in his recent memoir, Between the World and Me. Formally modelled on the first part of James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, the book is addressed to Coates’s teenage son, Samori, on the occasion of the non-indictment of Brown’s killer, a white police officer called Darren Wilson. ‘We are captured, brother, surrounded by the majoritarian ...”

“... In Henry James and the Art of Dress (2001), Clair Hughes gave us a beautifully judged view of James’s delicate way with garments. She showed that he was capable of conveying the effect of an entire ensemble in a few well-chosen words, and of accurately rendering the way dress affects feeling ...”

“... are not long sentences, purring and humming, those magnificent oceangoing structures launched by James or Mann or Proust: they are sentences that have forgotten to stop. Anyone who has seen elderly, broken-backed dachshunds being walked in parks with rollerskates supporting their middles will get the picture, but there are no rollerskates here. It may be ...”