“... around £3.3 billion, but its apologists (cursing critics as spoil-sports) speak airily of how all major construction projects come in a whisker over budget. Look at the Channel Tunnel, the Limehouse Link. Look at any of the enforced from above, late-century civil engineering achievements. Look at anything deriving from the key icon of the era, Margaret ...”

“... inhibition’, he goes on, ‘in part the direct result not only of censorship but also of a major government-cum-legal campaign in the mid-1950s against anything even faintly obscene, a campaign that among other cases saw the artist Donald McGill, king of the seaside postcard, briefly banged up for his depiction of an outsize, almost vertical stick of ...”

“... sampler of the high life. In both roles he fitted right in: he was, in his own words, John Bunyan’s ‘Mr Facing-both-ways’. He is intensely, almost insanely sociable. He discovered at an early age that being able to perform as a public speaker meant that ‘you need never dine or sleep alone.’ Early on, he mainly chose to sleep with boys ...”

“... work of history, delight in the Gibbonian wit and elegance of his writing and – still a major ingredient – Schadenfreude over his awful humiliation in the matter of the Hitler diaries. In his lifetime, nobody was sure how to take him. Those who supposed they had his measure soon found that they were wrong. The fogeyish camorra who ran Peterhouse ...”

“... sidelined in a print edition of one of her poems. Franklin, ironically, would undertake the next major print edition of Dickinson’s poetry. Old envelopes​ were just one of the many types of discarded paper on which Dickinson, particularly in her later, post-fascicle years, jotted down lines of poetry, so this book offers only a sample of the vast ...”

“... supposedly of the couple’s pots and pans, a bust of Cahun by Chana Orloff. The underbidder was John Berger, which suggests that there was some art-world knowledge of Cahun and Moore even then. Perhaps rebelling against a subtitle giving Moore equal creative status, Stevenson disposes of the idea that she made a contribution to the photographs, basing his ...”

“... He insisted on collective responsibility, even assembling a large, argumentative team to draft his major speeches. ‘What Stalin and Khrushchev had achieved with terror and humiliation, Brezhnev pushed through with his joviality and conviviality.’ His reign, which would last for almost twenty years, is often dismissed today as ‘the era of ...”

“... Her three husbands had 20 wives. Sinatra seems to have been the serious one. Shooting Mogambo, John Ford gave a party for the British Governor of Uganda and his wife. A man’s man, as they say, Ford thought of a little joke to put Ava on the spot. ‘Why don’t you tell the Governor what you see in that hundred-twenty-pound runt you’re married ...”

“... Queen’s Counsel. Still, as long as it’s men in wigs ... The real problem is the one to which John Griffith and others have repeatedly called attention: that the judiciary comes very largely from a tranche of society whose values, culture, données and attitudes are homogeneous because they are socially and educationally inbred. Less attention has perhaps ...”

“... panicked. One evening, just after I had dug my slit trench, word came that a nearby German major would be pleased to give dinner to a British officer in captivity. My host, with one eye, one arm, the Iron Cross with oakleaves, talked in a strained voice of the epic experience of war. Were we British, he wanted to know, terrified by the roar of the ...”

“... than with the interests of reason and truth. Territorial imperatives were clearly at stake when John Searle (in a recent number of the New York Review of Books) gave a simplified account of Jonathan Culler’s On Deconstruction, and used it to launch an attack on this whole new breed of overweening literary theorists. From this point of view, deconstruction ...”

“... of the Various Nations of the Known World, and decided then and there to write an epic about each major religion. Of the long poems in this edition, each several thousand lines long, Thalaba the Destroyer (1801) is a supposedly Islamic romance, Madoc (1805) sets Aztecs against Welsh Christians, and The Curse of Kehama (1810) takes on a lividly distorted ...”

“... of Linear Elamite. Afterwards, the keeper of the Middle East department at the British Museum, John Curtis, mentioned that he knew the Mahboubian family and could make an introduction. It took four years of cajoling but eventually the family agreed to withdraw the silver vessels from a safe deposit box for Desset to examine.Desset is adamant that without ...”

“... families of their donors), and it would soon give rise to a distinct interior aesthetic. Just as John Fowler, who would become the Trust’s favoured ‘decorator’ in the late Fifties, scorned the idea of ‘design’, James Lees-Milne distinguished the true country-house interior from the ‘contrived “old world” flavour’ of an architect like ...”

“... his life, work and influence on a variety of artists, from Marcel Duchamp to Michel Foucault, John Ashbery to Georges Perec. I recently spent several months working my way through this enormous archive in the stately gloom of the ornately carved Salon de Manuscrits on the first floor of the Bibliothéque Nationale, just down from the Bourse where Roussel ...”