“... the question of what could be performed and what had to be visualised offstage. She often took an oblique approach, skirting around the traditional centres of narratives. Cleopatra (c.1633-35) is remarkable for showing the queen already dead, her body drained and greyish, the asp uncoiled beside her on the bed. Esther before Ahasuerus (c.1628-30) is ...”

“... love. The book begins with Mimi – whose husband is in India for work – hosting a party for Mrs John D. Rockefeller III, ‘president of the Museum of Modern Art’, in her tastefully furnished home. At the party she encounters Tom Potts, an assistant of Mrs Rockefeller’s, and becomes infatuated. Potts knows where to buy Hermès scarves and bags at a ...”

“... Nestor, venerated from far and near as the oracular source of wisdom on Italian art, ‘II Bibi’ took on an iconic quality. In the public mind, he became the incarnation of Renaissance man, sustaining an exquisite humanism amidst the detritus of European cultural collapse. This must have been gratifying, for Berenson had long yearned to be identified with ...”

“... York’s Lower East Side, the whole family had appeared to be so unremarkable that the historian John Neville would say that ‘they might have been chosen at random from the telephone directory.’ Ethel’s father, Barney Greenglass, repaired sewing machines. Her mother, Tessie, was from Galicia (now part of Ukraine), and raised their four children in a ...”

“... steady companion called Hucks, picturesquely intent on a walking tour of North Wales. Their route took them through Oxford, where they looked up one of Coleridge’s old schoolmates, who took the visitors to see a notorious democrat at Balliol called Robert Southey. It was an encounter that, Southey would recall, ‘fixed ...”

“... on Germany in 1990, Trevor-Roper faced her down and tore her arguments to pieces. The historian John Habakkuk was an editor of Economic History Review in 1952 when Trevor-Roper’s onslaught against R.H. Tawney landed on his desk. He mused: ‘I find it difficult to decide whether T-R is a fundamentally nice person in the grip of a prose style in which it ...”

“... War, because strong language – like strong drink – is a way to alleviate despair. In 1930, John Brophy and Eric Partridge published a collection of British songs and slang from the war. They claimed that soldiers used the word ‘fucking’ so often that it was merely a warning ‘that a noun is coming’. In a normal situation, swear words are used ...”

“... So it comes as a bigger shock than the salmonella scare (Edwina Currie, 1988) or the BSE scare (John Selwyn Gummer, 1990) to hear the latest strand in the table talk: that the era of endless food is winding down.This belief is new. Until recently the discussion was largely about quality. Quantity and availability only entered the picture when we wondered ...”

“... like the whiff of cordite long after the gun has been fired. When I mention this to David Cornwell/John le Carré, he says: ‘I can still feel it in my nostrils now.’ Historians, like spooks, need a sensitive nose, Orwell’s ‘Sniff, sniff’ for the detection of ‘all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls’.3 (And, in ...”

“... soon veered towards compassion: ‘Du Maurier book upsets family and friends’. But most people took sides. Things came to a head after a programme about du Maurier on TV, called The Loving Heart after one of her novels. It was unremarkable in itself but several of the participants got wound up into declaring afterwards that they hadn’t said she ...”

“... out that Lonrho was breaking sanctions against the illegal regime in Rhodesia. The Foreign Office took the view that although sanctions-busting was all very well for oil companies and banks, it was not very wise where a member of the Royal Family was concerned. Ogilvy and Rowland parted like sorrowful lovers. Today Ogilvy’s Who’s Who entry does not ...”

“... for fresh marches of conquest. The ensuing adventures were narrated with devastating flatness by John Hemming in The Search for El Dorado. The gold-hunters got lost, ate grubs, grass and one another, were plagued by bugs and vampires, swelled or shrivelled or turned orange, devoured sweaty saddles in fits of salt-thirst, perished of ...”

“... a fervent faith in hierarchies, especially when he is at the top of them. From the moment he took power at the Sunday Times, he set about ridding the paper of what he called the ‘space barons’. The Insight team was disbanded, he writes, because it was engaged in ‘a series of second-rate investigations that were going nowhere’. He would keep the ...”

“... mechanical production of mass entertainment (the downside of Hollywood) and the academicism they took to be the besetting sin of French cinema. This position came to be articulated through the two concepts for which early Cahiers was best known: auteur and mise en scène. Despite the accompanying promotional noise, auteur-theory amounted to little more than ...”

“... the first common burglar in the history of petty crime who ‘panicked’ in such a way that he took his victim out of the house, where he and she were relatively unobserved, and in broad daylight drove her through crowded streets to a place where he carried out a ritual murder. There were those at the time who challenged the police assumptions. There were ...”