“... in 1929 and ran for 377 shows, was their real breakthrough. The brothers had joined forces with George S. Kaufman, a great wit and a cabaret writer of exquisite timing and pitch, and as might have been predicted, the solid support made them even bolder with improvisations. ‘I may be wrong,’ Kaufman was heard to say at a rehearsal, ‘but I think I just ...”

“... who hails first shall ask, What ship’s that? then he that is hailed shall answer King George then he who hailed first shall answer Queen Charlotte, and the other shall answer God Preserve.’ If the crews really got out of touch they were to leave messages in bottles at pre-assigned beaches or map readings. It helps also, in reading not Cook but ...”

“... Dunkirk. In addition, Dick Stokes and some thirty MPs wanted to seek terms and looked to Lloyd George. The old schemer was delighted to cast himself in the role of peacemaker. ‘I shall wait until Winston is bust,’ he said, and refused to join the Churchill Cabinet. Churchill himself said he would consider restoring Germany’s colonies, but he thought ...”

“... beyond a telephone chat with a GP. ‘The hospital services are always attentive and on the ball, but once you leave hospital, the GP becomes your access to any help,’ she explained. ‘We fell foul of a lot of reforms that have taken place.’ Fisher was 48 when he died, ‘an influential writer, music blogger and university lecturer’, the Ipswich ...”

“... the end. But the plotting is less important than the large-scale set pieces, such as a disastrous ball; and the novel succeeds thanks mostly to Farrell’s patience and inventiveness in charting the Majestic’s decline. This decline is, as Trevor put it, ‘no parochial phenomenon’. The Majestic – with its statue of Queen Victoria, its decrepit Imperial ...”

“... who recently became the agency’s director. Having served as its deputy executive director under George W. Bush, Brennan returned to government in 2008 as Obama’s chief counterterrorism adviser and, in some accounts, as a kind of father confessor, blessing the president’s lethal strikes as fully compliant with Catholic thinking about morally just ...”

“... I was rapt, like a hysterical spinster on her first visit to Bayreuth. Schwärmerei time for T-Ball.The Sarajevo obsession revealed itself early on: in fact, inspired the great comic episode in this brief golden period. We were walking down University Avenue, Palo Alto’s twee, boutique-crammed main drag, on our way to a bookshop. Sontag was wearing her ...”

“... irony (Huck’s account of the contents of the catfish’s stomach – a brass button, a round ball ‘and lots of rubbage’ – is pure Defoe). At Morton’s Academy, students were taught science and other subjects in English, not in Greek or Latin, a radical idea at the time, and they were also instructed in the art of writing good English prose, an ...”

“... and choose). In the 1950s, such admiration was not typical. At Eisenhower’s 1953 inauguration ball, a musical portrait of Lincoln by Aaron Copland – a full orchestral piece with excerpts from his speeches – was dropped at the last minute as ‘un-American’. But Lincoln was crucial to Monroe. Carl Sandburg, his biographer, became an important friend ...”

“... I sit on his knee as he hums ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’. My grandmother says: ‘George, teaching that child Protestant hymns!’ I dip my finger in his beer to taste it. For high days I have a thimble-sized glass to drink port. My grandmother says: ‘George, teaching that child to ...”

“... discusses some refurbishing of the Louvre, ‘Napoleone’, using the original Corsican spelling. George Eliot in her sardonic reference in Middlemarch to those ‘amazing gentlemen’ who perhaps find consolation ‘in the sense of a stupendous self and an insignificant world’, or Gertrude Stein in frequent comparisons between her acts of literary ...”

“... is written in that free-associative style Empson used in his first published poem, ‘Poem about a ball in the 19th century’, and in another here printed, called ‘Address to a Tennis Player’; the notes to the poems express some doubt about the virtues of this manner, and they seem justified, but he kept the first poem in the Collected and perhaps ...”

“... tongs of his own, in place of Monsieur le Blanc himself, to dress a lady’s hair in time for a ball. ‘All his friends had ten thousand a year; he talked of his horses and his carriages, his estate and his interest; and when he addressed you as a lady, you could not help drawing back for fear he should give you a kiss.’ Miss Townshend, she writes, was ...”

“... reader cares enough to decide which is which. He clogs scenes with lectures; an account of a drag ball, for instance, is drowned out by paragraphs of miscellaneous erudition: ‘So priests down through the ages, skirted in respectful imitation of androgynous deities who reigned before Baal was worshipped as a pillar, before Osiris sported erection, before men ...”

“... of them in fact. She told her granddaughter late in life that she and Henri had met at a costume ball in Brussels. She had been dressed as Elizabeth I; he – appropriately enough for a prince – had been a slim, pomaded, unusually fetching Hamlet. 3. The Doted-On Wastrel Son. Prince Henri’s By-Blow, Most Likely. Bernhardt had him in 1864, when she was ...”