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“... seemed just a little less febrile, she could have passed in the outside world for vivacious. ‘John,’ I said, noticing how dull my voice sounded – and I wanted to say more, but I couldn’t think of anything to say. ‘John,’ she repeated, smiling. She gave me a long, appraising look. ‘So. What are you in ...”

“... more than a potted biography, fleshed out with some not very revealing ‘exclusive’ interviews. John Ardoin is the major authority on Callas, who in Callas (with Gerald Fitzgerald, Thames and Hudson, 1974) and The Callas Legacy (Duckworth, 1977), has forged the most detailed and balanced account and critique of her career to appear to date. With this ...”

“... her tremulous, shy, disingenuous smile and saying Halloo with the dying fall of an F. Scott Fitzgerald chick spinning giddily to hell’. Carter establishes her dirty atmospherics with superb swiftness and confidence – some extravagant and dangerous players, a seedy Gothic neighbourhood both real and set-like. But she seems not to know what to ...”

“... sister Joanna (or Martha – the name is in doubt) were the youngest of ten daughters of the late John Taaffe of Smarmore Castle, Co. Louth. At the ages of 26 and 30 respectively, they have been despatched to Rome by the current head of the family, their half-brother, another John Taaffe, to visit a distant kinsman, Lord ...”

“... then who is left to man the supposedly overbearing metropolis, unless it is Kingsley Amis and John Betjeman? The ramparts so frailly manned should have given way long ago to the armies massed against them. What Crawford doesn’t realise is that this indeed has happened; he is sounding the bugle for an assault on a fortress that surrendered years ago. The ...”

“... The date​ of the story in Ridley Scott’s new alien movie is 2104, ten years after the messy, murderous events that put an end to the previous prequel, Prometheus (2012). True to the tradition of the franchise, virtually the whole crew of a spaceship is wiped out in both films. Alien (1979) ended with Sigourney Weaver’s voice saying into the ship’s log: ‘This is Ripley, last survivor of the Nostromo, signing off ...”

“... Tower of Blue Horses; a Monet of yachts on a river; Duncan Grant’s Dancers, a cornfield by John Nash. The one original was a watercolour by T.A. McCormack dominated by a Chinese fish plate. Over the years all this moved towards something prettier; the first impulse to modernity was not wholly sustained. Happiness was a professional matter because I ...”

“... of geography and ethnic settlement? In Conquests, Catastrophe and Recovery the medievalist John Gillingham shows that biological and political accidents mattered as much as supposed natural frontiers in the making of nations. If Henry of Northumbria had not predeceased his father, King David I of Scotland, in 1152, Britain might have been divided at ...”

“... The Scott Street exterior of the west wing of Glasgow School of Art in 1933. I had​ the daily pleasure of seeing the west wing of the Glasgow School of Art, with its castle-like stonework and triple tall oriels rising dramatically from the steep slope of Scott Street, when, for more than a decade, I taught architectural history at the Mackintosh School of Architecture ...”

“... might be a better phrase since the self is often split by extreme stress and exhaustion (Doug Scott speaking to his feet in his bivouac with Dougal Haston near the summit of Everest, Joe Simpson’s ‘voice’ that kept him right on his agonising descent). It is a mark of John Harrison’s quality in Climbers that he ...”

“... about that: he said the fondness for clans was a consequence of a Southern addiction to Walter Scott. He was only half-joking when he said that Scott’s heroic clans, and their readiness for battle, were responsible for the Civil War. Unlike the Hunts, the Bushes have never had their tycoon, although several have tried ...”

“... John Clearwater, the tormented mathematician in William Boyd’s novel Brazzaville Beach, wants to reduce chaos, flux and turbulence to an elegant set of equations. He’s also an obsessive moviegoer who refuses to watch anything which doesn’t meet his one absolute criterion: ‘he believed, with a fundamental zeal, that a true film, a film that was true to the nature of its own form, had to have a happy ending ...”

“... Sir John Junor made his reputation mainly as the man prepared to be more bitchy about famous people than any other newspaper columnist. This was the basis on which he conducted his column on the Sunday Express, the paper he also edited for 32 years, and which underpins its less successful appearance nowadays in the Mail on Sunday ...”

“... is now in the library founded by a rather more public-spirited buccaneer of book collecting, John Pierpont Morgan). Paul Meyer’s career was a model of all that is best in academic rigour; he later helped analyse the documents which led to the acquittal of Alfred Dreyfus. The History of William Marshal contains nearly twenty thousand lines of ...”

“... he had built. Wal-Mart continued its expansion after his death in 1992; its current chairman, Lee Scott, has headed the firm since 2000. At the time of writing the Walton family share of Wal-Mart is worth $102 billion. (The 2004 Bush tax cut benefited the family to the tune of $91,500 per hour.) Wal-Mart is the biggest company in the world. It has two million ...”