“... scholarship that the staff in auction houses have enjoyed. Lacey devotes an early chapter to Charles Bell, Keeper of the Department of Fine Art at the Ashmolean Museum, who between 1920 and 1924 spent one day a week cataloguing Old Master drawings and paintings (especially British portraits) at Sotheby’s to a completely new standard. Lacey depends ...”

“... a single bishop at the top of his list of achievements?’ It is the voice of sober realism. Canon Charles Pattinson, who had been Henson’s chaplain, finally persuaded Chadwick to take on the at first rather repugnant task of spending so long with the Henson papers and writing the bishop’s life. Pattinson told him that ‘Henson’s ...”

“... predictable. In the first paragraph of the General Introduction Deane compares this anthology with Charles Read’s Cabinet of Irish Literature (1879): it would be interesting to learn why Field Day rejected writers such as Monk, Ryves, Tighe, Leadbetter, Hall, Mulholland, and over a dozen other women who appear in Read. I particularly missed some of the ...”

“... made his living from: Théophile Gautier’s later guess at Goya’s feelings in his portrait of Charles IV and Family – ‘the baker on the corner and his wife after they’ve won the lottery’ – is unforgettable and wrong. Yet I stand by my first intuition. Of course as I spent more time at the show and became accustomed to Goya’s visual idiom ...”

“... but relations became strained last year when Moscow denounced its rapporteur, Britain’s Frank Judd, and refused to go on working with him. Judd’s successor, the Swiss Andreas Gross, was allowed into Chechnya in August in spite of criticising the lack of democracy in the elections Russia organised. Gross believes that the world has to work with the ...”

“... in his verse-play, Sunday Morning at the Centre of the World: it’s not much of a play, to be frank). The aimless years of his young manhood were now magically converted into high-grade literary capital. His first novel, The War of Don Emmanuel’s Nether Parts came out in 1990. It was well received, and two more novels followed, also set in ‘an ...”

“... but Bertolt Brecht called it ‘the greatest thing I have seen in American theatre’. (He and Charles Laughton hoped in vain that Welles would direct their 1947 production of Galileo.) By the mid-1940s, Welles regarded Hollywood as a place where he made money by acting. But he also persuaded the independent producer Walter Wanger to buy the rights to ...”

“... on cross-breeding as a means of preventing degeneration inspired proto-eugenic schemes, including Charles-Augustin Vandermonde’s Essay on the Manner of Improving the Human Species (1756), and the first practical projects of racial engineering in French colonies. These revolved around the creation of a mixed Euro-African race, in charge of military ...”

“... without remembering that all the work in this particular show was purchased or commissioned by Charles Saatchi. No doubt he will be pleased to be compared with Isabella d’Este. If there is a serious theme running through these essays, it concerns the nature of the ‘modern’ and the ‘new’ as governing principles of 20th-century art. The underlying ...”

“... of Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em on Sheppey in 1975, the year after Johnson arrived. In the episode Frank Spencer takes his driving test for the tenth time, and hundreds of locals stood on the beach to watch Crawford, who was known for doing his own stunts, drive a blue Hillman Imp off Sheerness jetty. Crawford is Sheppey showbiz royalty: his mother, Doris ...”

“... was never permitted to become a defining feature of Irish Catholic culture.’ Frank Duff, who founded the Legion of Mary and was perhaps the most influential Catholic layman of the time, ‘was an able defender of the Jewish community’, as were some of his colleagues. Anti-semitism in Ireland was kept on the fringes of the Catholic ...”

“... much matters: deterrence deterred and deterred both ways. It worked, for example, against plans by Frank Wisner of the CIA to commit paramilitary groups trained in West Germany to aid the Hungarian uprising in 1956 and it made the Russians generally cautious outside their own sphere. President Glafkos Cleridis of Cyprus has revealed that after the first ...”

“... that they had been beaten up? And who was to say no to the Home Office forensic scientist, Dr Frank Skuse, who told the court he was ‘99 per cent certain’ that the three men whose hands turned positive in the Greiss test had been handling nitroglycerine? When the unanimous guilty verdict came, it was fully expected, and greeted with widespread ...”

“... Collingwood (Collingwood being a hero of Trafalgar), Lancaster wrote a stream of nautical novels. Frank Barrett (1848-1926) was a successful potter when, in the early 1880s, his kiln collapsed, destroying two years’ work. He was persuaded in this crisis to become a novelist, and went on to write (very profitably) some fifty romances. William Alexander ...”

“... from anyone’s received idea of a poet. He wasn’t poor: in fact, he was very rich, the son of Charles Merrill, founder of the biggest Wall Street brokerage firm, Merrill Lynch. He wasn’t tormented – at least he didn’t have mental breakdowns or attempt suicide. He drank a lot but not famously and he eventually joined AA without becoming sanctimonious ...”