“... met Princess Margaret ... yet?’ At Quentin’s we grew used to finding Koestler, Bernard Levin, Peter Sellers, Ken Tynan, Keith Richards – but none of these quite counted as in her league. As Quentin observes here, with a pretence of puzzlement, ‘even in supposedly relaxed and liberal circles, very few managed to behave normally with ...”

“... dimple-cheeked deus ex machina Lodge pulls out, with the implacable defiance of a Blue Peter presenter exclaiming, ‘Here’s one I prepared earlier,’ as Ursula is conveniently rewarded with the discovery of a cache of immensely valuable IBM share certificates that pay for her new, improved nursing-home care (and a cool $100,000 left over to ...”

“... 1960 Williams was playing with Fenella Fielding in the revue Pieces of Eight (largely written by Peter Cook) at the Apollo Theatre, and his diary entry for the 27th reads: ‘The show in evening went well, till Madam decided to ad lib one line before the tag in “Spies”. Of course it threw me completely. This is the last straw. I’ve reported it to the ...”

“... There’s more dash and novelty, but little more analysis, in the treatment accorded P.D. James, Peter Lovesey, Nicholas Freeling, Simenon, Chandler and the husband-and-wife team of Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö. Only one of the essays seems really ambitious, and the effect, I’m afraid, is comic. Eric Mottram – an otherwise much respected old friend of ...”

“... In any case, Reid made his disagreements with Hutcheson explicit in his lectures at Glasgow: see Peter Kivy’s edition of Thomas Reid’s Lectures on the Fine Arts (1973). The conclusion is inescapable: either Jefferson changed his mind or he never noticed the problem. There is no evidence that he changed his mind, and it turns out that what Wills has ...”

“... they have been and remain oppressive, and those – here, primarily theatre practitioners such as Peter Sellars, Anchuli Felicia King and Keith Hamilton Cobb – who still find enabling possibilities in their performance. (Sellars has a fascinating exchange with Ayanna Thompson in which they discuss the paradoxical advantages enjoyed by performances of ...”

“... the Colosseum could accommodate Rome’s entire population twice. The palaces on the Palatine Hill were slowly falling apart; the grand ancient churches served congregations a fraction of their former size. What had once been a metropolis of more than a million inhabitants had shrunk to around thirty thousand.All over Europe buildings stood empty. The ...”

“... together. Elena was now Helen, Mummy not Mami; Papa became Daddy; the boys were still Donald and Peter, of course, but they had far fewer words at their disposal by which to express themselves. They were now British – British refugees, to be exact – not just because their identity documents said so, but because their survival depended on it. And thus ...”

“... educationalists of the turn of the century. ‘There was something royal in her nature,’ Octavia Hill wrote. There was also a strongly masculine element. She was one of the conspicuous successes of the liberal and unsectarian Bedford College: a brilliant scholar (as well as an expert carpenter) and a supporter of liberal movements – she kept as a souvenir ...”

“... describes something astonishing. He writes that the neighbour’s children have come down the hill to the shore, and innumerable tiny fish have arrived in the bay: When I reached the water myself it was like wading in silver treacle; our bare legs pushed against the packed mass of little fish as against a solid and reluctantly yielding obstacle. To scoop ...”

“... endorses the hyper-sceptical ‘biblical minimalism’ of Philip Davies, Thomas Thompson and Niels Peter Lemche, which regards such findings as irrelevant since, as they see it, the early history of Israel is actually a fiction that returnees from the Babylonian exile made up after the sixth century BCE. Sand seems unaware of the conflict between the two views ...”

“... was a highly emotional moment: men wept as eight hundred or so Orangemen marched down the Garvaghy hill, past the residents of the Garvaghy Road, who at a given signal removed themselves from the thoroughfare. The RUC had had to decide whether more chaos would result from maintaining the ban than from allowing the Orangemen to march. Some Catholics I know in ...”

“... not only the improvement of biographical fact but the artistic shaping of it. No one would accuse Peter Gwyn, author of The King’s Cardinal, of confusing life with art. His intentions are too austere to risk that imputation. Although his important and very long book proclaims itself a ‘biography’ of Thomas Wolsey, it fulfils few of the expectations ...”

“... and vignettes. ‘I am Mrs Sabawala,’ an Indian admirer announces. ‘My house on Malabar Hill is a sermon in stone. Lunch with me tomorrow.’ He takes part in a gala at the Foreign Office to celebrate the visit of the French President in March 1939: ‘It was a tremendous affair, the last of its kind before the war and I could not help referring to ...”

“... reserves of only 8.5 billion to 14 billion barrels. To the companies’ fury, the LSE academic, Peter Odell, argued that this was just an oligopolistic fudge: the true reserves he estimated to be between 78 and 100 billion barrels. In the end this turned out to be far closer to the truth: the early estimates of Brent and Forties both had to be upped ...”